Persona's!

Insights:
Today we have finished our user research and created our persona's! We promised to give you some conclusions about of research yesterday, well here they are :-) We asked for some advice from Anne the User Insight Superwoman, see the photo on the left. First some general insights into teenage shopping behaviour. They are the following:

- shopping for clothes isn't really about clothes! It's about social interaction, bonding with your friends, being pretty or finding your identity. We found out that swapping, borrowing and giving each other advice about clothes is a very important social ritual for teenage girls. It confirms their friendship and that's very important!
- teenage girls don't always follow the fashion trends from magazines: usually only one or two in a group will look at those trends and for the rest the girls mostly copy each other.
- extreme shopping behaviour isn't about shopping addicts or impulsive buying, but more about the way they want to look and present themselves to other teens.
- teens really ARE interested in having unique clothing (up to a point!) - they like to make their clothing items just a bit more special and personal, but they don't like to (or know how to) do the handwork.


But we have gone a lot further than these general insights: we have created three persona's who represent different kinds of ways teenage girls think about their clothing. We have done a lot of super extreme brainstorming and REALLY getting into the heads of our persona's - you can see the results of our chaotic persona developing process above. So now, meet our persona's!

Stella - the pretty innovator
Primary persona (most wasteful shopper)

Stella is sort of the popular girl in school, always connected to lots of friends and very chatty. She really loves to be pretty and be admired by lots of boys (and other girls of course). Stella is kind of trendsetter in school - she's the one who looks in the magazines and likes to try new outfits. She's buying new clothes almost every week and often throws them away within a year. Sometimes she's an impulse shopper and only hangs on to a piece of clothing for a couple of weeks before she gets bored with it. For Stella it is really important to be noticed and admired because of her looks, so that is definitely what gets the most attention.

Stella's #1 need - to be pretty & fabulous and to be admired

Anna - the sweet imitator
(least wasteful shopper, but probably the largest group)

Anna is a sweet but kind of shy girl who's first interest lies in her friends. She has one best friend and they are more or less inseparable - always hanging out together! Shopping is for Anna very much a social activity, giving and receiving advice and borrowing eachothers clothes are almost a sort of rituals to confirm their friendship. Anna looks to others, especially her friends, to figure out what she wants to wear herself. She is a bit more sentimental than Stella and has this jacket that she is always wearing because it reminds her of all the good times she had with her friends (even though it is not very fashionable anymore), but most of her clothes get replaced in a year or two.

Anna's #1 need - bonding with her (best) friends

Marsha - the profiler
(not very wasteful on average, but sometimes changes her entire wardrobe in one go)

Marsha is the "alternative" girl in school, every six months or so changing her appearance when she has changed her mind about her identity. At the moment she's into her "goth" fase, so she wears a lot of black cothing and eye make-up. She knows her classmates think she's a bit weird, but she doesn't care because she has her own group of friends who accept her as she is, especially since they act the same way. Marsha is actually quite insecure about herself and who she really is - she doesn't really know yet who she wants to be, but she definately knows who she doesn't want to be! Marsha uses fashion and clothing as a way to express her current identity to everyone (maybe including herself)

Marsha's #1 need - to explore (her) identities.

We've also got some interesting design spaces, but we're saving them up for you tomorrow! :-)