When it comes to website look, feel and functionality, many companies have let technology, development tools and hunches do the driving rather than data about customers’ needs. But with e-commerce maturing, some B2C (and B2B) sites have become overloaded with information leading to confused navigation, grandfathered dead ends and, ultimately, frustrated end users. Worse, the site might be playing to the wrong audience, especially if your business model has changed or your audience has matured. If it’s time to update your website, "persona-based design" can put customers?rather than servers,

GIFs or programming languages?at the center of discussions on designing user interfaces.

With persona-based design, ethnographic researchers study the behavior of current and potential customers by conducting interviews with them and by observing not only their use of the website but their daily routines. Based on these findings, research, design and development teams draw up anywhere from two to five different character sketches?known as personas?which represent basic types of customers.

When Medco Health Solutions undertook a redesign of its website, Medcohealth.com, in 2002, the pharmacy benefits manager hired a Web design company that employed the persona-based methodology to gear the site toward an aging population and to untangle its labyrinthine taxonomy. Steve Gold, the former CIO of the Franklin Lakes, N.J.-based company, says he saw persona-based design as a way to bring end users to life for the digital design group and pertinent business units. "We wanted the developers and workgroups to have empathy for the individuals they were building the software systems for, having them rally around somebody tangible as opposed to just building a website in a vacuum, which is the more conventional way of doing it."

Working with Cooper, a San Francisco-based Web company that developed the persona-based methodology, Medco Health designers created four fictional characters whose lives and ailments were based on their own research as well as real people Cooper interviewed. They used these characters to guide the redesign of Medcohealth.com and invoked them during meetings or alone in their cubicles when hashing out the layout of the new site. By focusing their redesign efforts on a particular demographic and by conducting in-depth research into this segment’s lifestyles, health issues and Web literacy, Medco Health was able to create a website that met its users’ needs?without disagreements based on gut feelings about what customers wanted and needed. Because the site was so well attuned to the reasons why customers visited, the company was also able to minimize the number of costly changes it had to make to the site after actual users tested it.