How to collect data for your personas

As I mentioned earlier, keep it simple. You don’t want to have to spend too long on this task. However, if you want to get analytical about it, you can.

Ways you can determine who is looking at your websites is through your website analytics. You can get gender, age groups, location etc from these.

Google Analytics have some basic demographics info.

Another technique is to do a survey… you can send out a short survey to your mail list, social pages, or a survey located on your website. But you need to keep surveys short and simple.

Generally, people couldn’t be bothered with surveys, so you need to keep it to 2 or 3 questions. Ask a few simple things like ‘why are they on your website? What are their goals?

You can even get more personal and find out their age, gender, etc if it will help your requirements. Best if you have yes or no questions or multiple choice.

Finding out when they are on your website is also a useful thing. Also if they are on a smartphone, ipad or laptop/ desktop.

It is all just data that you can use to create a profile for your personas.