When creating websites, it is important to target the design to the people actually using the website. According to Harvard’s Business School, “Target audience refers to the group of consumers most likely interested in your products or services, who should be the focus of your marketing campaign.” To help when building a website, professionals create personas to figure out the goals, motivations, reasoning, and frustrations that are likely to come from their target audience.
I think a great example of a persona is myself, funny enough. In the spring, my friends and I are planning to go to Costa Rica and are actively using Airbnb to book our trip. Going through the process of finding different places, comparing them to other places, talking with my group, and repeating is a very accurate part of the entire booking process, and I tried to reflect that in the actual persona. Airbnb definitely makes it easy to find different places, but it is interesting to see how the experiences match up.
This is the entire reason for the persona, so the people at Airbnb can see who is viewing their site, how they are using it, and what they are looking for. They can take this very valuable information and reflect it back into the design of the website or the marketing they do. Airbnb itself talks about their competitors and how they stand out, saying, “Others in the hospitality industry have also noted this trend, and we are flattered that those in the travel sector who were once skeptical of home sharing now seek to replicate the Airbnb model. Many traditional hospitality companies and the organizations they fund have resisted home sharing, spending millions of dollars to campaign against people sharing their homes. We are gratified to see these organizations now acknowledge that home sharing is an acceptable, and for many, preferred way to travel. While they were against it before, they are for it; it is better to arrive late than never arrive at all.” This information is very important when it comes to the users of the website and when and how they plan on using the site.
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