User Segmentation vs User Persona

Doing Laundry

Have you ever sorted your clothes before washing?

If you haven’t, maybe you should start doing it now. Separating dark colored clothes from whites or heavies from lights extends the life of your clothing and better preserves their color.

Setting loads of dirtier clothes to heavier settings gets them cleaner faster. A small amount of planning and effort before washing your clothes could save you the time and money required to frequently replace the ill-washed clothes.

But, why am I talking about laundry?

Because, if every article of clothing doesn’t responds well to the same washer settings, so why would different users all have the same experience with your product? Users of your product are at least slightly more complex than a polo shirt.

Hence, to serve the users well and to build the best product for their needs, we need to understand exactly what type and categories of users do we have. That’s why we have user segmentation.

User Segmentation

User segmentation is the product management equivalent to sorting laundry.

Grouping your users by shared characteristics reveals insights into how these segments are interacting with your product — and, most importantly, where your product can be improved to provide them with a better experience.

Instead of treating a single user experience as the most important, you should leverage user segmentation to identify and embrace the different ways customers use your product.

How does user segmentation help?

Let’s take an example. Say our product is a new community swimming pool. The top-requested features (and number of requests) are as follows:

1. Starting blocks | 17
2. Ping pong table | 15
3. Lounge chairs | 14
4. Concession stand | 12
5. Swim lanes | 12
6. Branded swim caps | 11
7. Water slide | 7
8. Basketball court | 4

We have the budget and capacity to choose three of these features by opening day so we choose the top three.

The opening day arrives and we eagerly await to see who subscribes for an annual membership to my pool with starting blocks, a ping pong table, and lounge chairs.

But to our accountant’s horror, no one subscribes!

Why aren’t people subscribing? Did they lie about their needs?!

The truth is that further analysis would have shown that in order to subscribe, each segment has a few dealbreakers — requirements that if not met, will ensure they take their business elsewhere.

• Competitive swimmers need starting blocks AND swim lanes
• Teenagers need ping pong AND a concession stand AND a basketball court
• Parents need lounge chairs AND swim lanes for lap swim AND a waterslide

By delivering starting blocks, a ping pong table, and lounge chairs, we incidentally met one dealbreaker for each segment, but did not deliver sufficient functionality to be good enough for any segment.

So, by not understanding our user segments and their needs, we missed a chance to build a product that solves the needs of at least 1 segment of user properly.

What should have been done:

In this scenario, the chances of competitive swimmers being the subscribers would have increased.

How do we segment users?

In theory, there are an endless number of characteristics with which you could segment your users. However, in practice, you cannot segment users on just any characteristic; you need to have data that enables the identification of if a user has a particular characteristic.

These are some of the common segmentation model:

1. Demographic — Demographic segmentation uses demographic attributes, such as gender, language, race, and geography to divide up the user population.
2. Device — Device type segmentation is particularly useful for answering certain questions, such as:
   - Do desktop users versus mobile users behave differently across device types?
   - Are updates to your apps improving the experiences of the different groups of users? Or are updates introducing problems that you haven’t yet identified?
   - Are there features or capabilities that you haven’t enabled on certain platforms that might meaningfully impact overall user retention?
3. Acquisition Source — This segmentation is used to analyze differences in users based on where they were acquired. Common sources include organic, google search, and facebook ads.
4. Usage Patterns — We can segment users by their usage patterns of the product. Users who give referrals can be very different from users who don’t. Users who do more than 1 payment a day can be very different from person who does none.

What is a User Persona?

Once you are done with user research and are trying to make sense of whatever you have learnt about the user, you figure out the user segments that will be interacting with your product and then create user personas.

You can think of user personas as a representative of the segments that you have identified from your research.

A user persona is basically a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s fictional because you are imagining a person with various characteristics and that person is not real, but the characteristics that they have are a representation of the insights you got from your user research.

A persona incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of the target audience.

An example of a user persona:

Why do we need a User Persona?

Understanding the needs of your users is vital to developing a successful product. Well-defined personas will enable you to efficiently identify and communicate user needs. Personas will also help you describe the individuals who use your product, which is essential to your overall value proposition.

Knowing your audience will help influence the features you choose, thus making your product more useful. A persona clarifies who is in your target audience by answering the following questions:

• Who is my ideal customer?
• What are the current behavior patterns of my users?
• What are the needs and goals of my users?
• What issues and pain points do they currently face within the given context?

How can we make a User Persona?

A well-defined user persona contains these pieces of information:

• Who is the user? You can mention the user’s demographic profile here.
• End goals and aspirations of the users
• Pain points and challenges to achieving the goals
• Activities and experiences of the users

Okay, to give you an example, let’s make a user persona of ideal user for this 30 Days of PM challenge.

• Sakshi, 23 years old Software Engineer working full time
• Lives in Bengaluru, India
• Wants to break into Product Management role
• Don’t know how and where to start learning
• Spends her time on LinkedIn and Twitter interacting with people in tech

This could be a user persona for 30 Days of PM right? And I am sure a lot of you relate to this as well.

Do you want to become a Product Manager?

If your answer is “yes”, you can follow me here and go through the other stuff I have written. Try to learn as much as you can from here.

If that isn’t enough or doesn’t help and if you want a more personalised learning experience, consider joining our Product Management Cohort at Crework — Apply now