Using personas to develop the LED Savings Calculator

Using personas to develop the LED Savings Calculator

TRIMM developed the LED Savings Calculator for Philips Lighting. It helps consumers worldwide to calculate the amount of money they could save by switching over to LED lights. The app offers advice based on the bulb(s) the user wants to replace. Following this advice, the user can immediately purchase the suggested LED bulb. To ensure a good match with the needs of all target audiences, we used personas during the development process. Read on below to learn how the use of personas can positively impact the outcome of a project like the LED Savings Calculator.

The goal of using personas

Personas are fictional characters that represent the target audience of your website or application. These personas gain an identity of their own by being represented as real people with character traits, preferences, goals, and skills. Additionally, personas often get a name and a face. This allows both the developers at TRIMM and the people at Philips to better connect with their audience on an emotional level, which makes it easier to ensure that the product matches closely with the target audience. The key to creating representative personas is plenty of in-depth research.

Extreme personas

The LED Savings Calculator has many different target audiences, in general all consumers with lights in their homes. This is why we chose to create two ‘extreme’ personas that are primarily opposed in technical knowledge. In spite of this outspoken difference, the LED Savings Calculator still had to be attractive to both personas. This way, the tool also appeals to people sitting in between the extremes.

Emma and Deepak

To develop the personas several brainstorming sessions were set up between Philips and TRIMM. During these sessions we let our minds run wild about which audiences we wanted to engage with, and what they looked like. This was further supplemented with qualitative data from the website and market research. After a few a fruitful meetings, Emma and Deepak were born.

Emma is a married ‘mom’ interested in interior decoration. She came across the LED Savings Calculator while on the hunt for inspiration at a Dribble event (community for the design-minded). Emma doesn’t have any kind of technical knowledge, and is mainly interested in the amount of money she can save by using LED lights. She prefers browsing at home on the couch using her iPad.

Deepak on the other end, is a real tech-head. He holds a degree in computer science and works as a software developer. He spends most of his leisure time behind his computer, perusing his favorite websites for the latest developments in tech. Deepak is not just interested in the savings but also in the way they’re calculated.

How did we use these personas during development?

Based on Emma and Deepak’s character traits we determined which features the tool had to have. The most important aspect was ensuring that the basic premise of the tool was accessible to everyone; calculating potential cost savings by switching to LED lights. For the ‘Deepaks’ amongst the user base we added in some neat bonus features. One example is the option to deconstruct the way the cost savings were calculated. This allows demanding, critical users like Deepak to double-check whether or not the calculation is up to their technical standards. The addition of these bonus features ascertains a great user experience across the entire spread of the target audience.