The Science Behind Creating Buyer Personas

The Science Behind Creating Buyer Personas infographic from WSI does a good job explaining why personas are way more than just demographic information. Too many companies don't dig deep enough when creating buyer personas to really understand their customers' decision making process.

A buyer persona can be one of the most powerful tools in helping you devise effective marketing strategies.

Wikipedia defines a buyer persona as “fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.”

The process and resulting personas are particularly useful for businesses who recognize the value of content-marketing. The secret of content marketing is hiding in plain site: if you want your business to be found by prospective clients, referred by existing clients, lauded by critics, you need to start by creating great content that they will want to read.

Personas are a great foundation to identify the topics that are of interest, and the voice you should use to communicate them.

This infographic is a fun way of looking at how to go about this process. It isn’t easy, but it is extraordinarily valuable!

Sometimes infographics tell stories about concepts or processes instead of large data sets or statistics. This one uses icons and illustrations to help marketers understand how complicated building buyer personas can be.

Oddly, the infographic appears to be hosted on the MarketingProfs website instead of WSI. I couldn't find an original infographic landing page from WSI.

The Process of Designing an Infographic

The Process of Designing an Infographic is an interactive design that outlines my own infographic design process. My data visualization and infographics design company, InfoNewt, uses this process when designing infographics for clients, and I teach this process in my workshops and classes. The team at Visme.co created an interactive infographic version of it using the Visme design platform. Visme.co is a fantastic online design platform for infographics, presentations, reports and more.

Most of my designs follow this 5-step process:

1. Data Research - Start with the data. What's the insight or story?
2. Wireframe - Wireframe your story before you start any design work 
3. Design Concepts - Experiment with design ideas by creating rough concepts that visualize your data in a handful of different ways
4. Iterate - Choose one design direction or combine a few different ideas from your concepts.
5. Finalize - The final step is to finalize your design with the appropriate Copyright or Creative Commons license, and export the final design to a few different file formats as necessary. 

One of the advantages of using Visme as the platform to design your infographic is that you can create interactive elements in your design. In this case, you can see the original interactive version on the Visme site, that includes additional information when you mouse over each process step. This is built in Javascript, and anyone can share the interactive version by using the embed code on their own website.

You can embed the interactive infographic on your own site by using this HTML code:

<script src='//my.visme.co/visme.js'></script> <div class='visme_d' data-url='the-process-of-designing-an-infographic-d25a0c' data-w='800' data-h='2982'></div>

How to Build a Website in 2015

Do you have plans to build a website soon? There are three major different workflow styles. How to Build a Website in 2015 from Rukzuk has shown the 3 most popular workflows so that you can pick the style that fits your skills.

There’s tons of different ways to get from client briefing to a live, working website. We’ve put the three most popular workflows up against each other. What’s your workflow of choice?

Simple clean design that does a good job of comparing the three different workflows without overwhelming the reader with too much information. Great job with the Creative Common license and complete list of data sources!

Found on Rukzuk.com

A Website Design Process

A Website Designed is a process explanation infographic, created by John Furness of Simple Square, highlights the phases of creating a website for a designer and the client. 

A Website Designed is an infographic of the average website’s creation. Feel free to download and share this, or link directly to it here on our blog.

Great visualization design of a business process.  The sequential events are arranged along a straight timeline, but a number of additional elements of information have been added.  Color-coding, sized circles and milestones all add valuable information to the reader.

A high-resolution PDF is available in multiple languages: English, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Dutch.

Found on Simple Square!

Design Client Engagement Poster

The Design Client Engagement Poster argues that a positive client experience can lead to a sustainable business. The poster separates the experience into 3 phases. The Pre-Service Phase is about client’s expectations, the Service Phase is about the client’s experiences, and the Post-Service Phase is about client satisfaction/dissatisfaction. This poster can be found on Design Client Engagement.com and is available for purchase for $25 + shipping here.

A positive client experience with your service can lead to more clients and ultimately, a sustainable business. A service does not exist in isolation; it is a string of experiences made up of touchpoints over time. Like a chain that will break at the weakest link, the client experience will break at the weakest touchpoint.

Cool visual explanation design created by Matt Pasternack from Nack Creative can be found on www.designclientengagement.com!

How to Find A Missing Child Using Social Media

Find Your Missing Child is a new infographic design by the team at JESS3.com for FindYourMissingChild.org.

Find Your Missing Child (FYMC) was founded after social media and email helped successfully find one missing child.  FYMC’s goal is to educate families about the community-building powers of social media and email to help in the search for a missing child.

The design does a good job of walking the reader through the statistics and benefits of engaging with social media as a tool in the search for a missing child.  The path provides a clear sequence of information for the readers to follow.

Some of the statistics are impressive, and would make a bigger impression on the reader if they had been visualized.  Big numbers are not data visualizations, and many designs make the mistake that using a big font makes the numbers more impressive.  An infographic should put those values into context for the reader by visualizing them.

In the footer, the URL to the infographic landing page is missing and would be helpful to readers that want to find the original full-size infographic.

Thanks to Jarred for sending in the link!

How Texas Laws Are Made

Texas Co-Op Power brings us the How Texas Laws Are Made infographic outlining the process bills go through in the state legislature to become the law of the land.  Also available as a PDF for download here.

The 83rd session of the Texas Legislature—150 representatives and 31 senators—is under way. What transpires over the 140-day session that began January 8 may seem incomprehensibly complex to the average citizen. So, in the interest of keeping our co-op members informed and involved, we offer this compact guide to how a bill moves through the legislative process and reasons why communication with your legislators matters.

Designed by Mike Wirth Art with Suzanne Cooper-Guasco, Ph.D., this infographic uses a game-board design style to online all of the steps along the path.  The color-coding to differentiate the activities between the House, the Senate and the Governor is clear and easy to understand.

Life of a Cask: Wine to Whiskey

 

Wow! Who knew that the Cask would be so valuable! It is a key ingredient to making our favorite wine and whiskeys! See how Scotch depends on Sherry in the infographic Life of a Cask: Wine to Whiskey from winefolly.com.

An infographic on the life of a cask, from wine to whiskey. Find out where casks start their life and see how Scotch is dependent on Sherry.

Cask Facts

• Used wine barrels are in high demand for Scotch and whisky production.
• Distilleries prefer Oloroso Sherry casks and other dessert wine casks such as Port and Sauternes for aging whisky.
• Sherry producers use larger casks called Hogheads (250 L) and Butts (500 L).
• Some distilleries own forests in America where they source quercus alba (white oak) to produce casks.
• Distilleries often loan unused casks to Sherry producers to ‘season’ them.

A Single malt Scotch cask ages 3-40+ years. A single cask may be used for up to 70 years

Nice visual explanation.  Easy to follow with a focused message that isn’t crowded with a bunch of additional factoids.  

The text is a little too small to read without zooming in closer, and there should be a URL at the bottom linking back to the original infographic landing page.  Otherwise, how can people find the original version they can read when a blog doesn’t link back correctly?

Just in time for the weekend too, it’s making my thirsty…

Thanks to Justin for sending in the link!

Broken Appliances: Repair or Replace?

PartSelect.com brings us a cool, interactive infographic that helps customers evaluate what to do with their Broken Appliances: Repair or Replace?  Obviously a design from an appliance parts retailer showing customers why they should buy repair parts instead of replacing their appliances, but it’s really good information and doesn’t feel like a hard sell.  It is actually very valuable information for consumers.

We created this diagnostic infographic to troubleshoot some of the common problems that affect household appliances. Clicking on the pulsing dots shows each common issue and the parts required to correct the problem. Many people replace an entire appliance, which is neither cost-effective nor environmentally responsible. We displayed the average cost of replacing the appliance as well as the cost of the parts required to fix the problem (and a scale of the difficulty of the repair).

I really like the design that places the replacement parts radially around the applicances.  The color coding for cost and difficulty also works well, but it would have been better without the legend (“Legends are Evil”).  Without the 1-2-3 as the text in the arc, it could have easily said Easy-Difficult-Very Difficult in the arcs.

Apparently the length of the arcs doesn’t have any meaning, although it looks like it should.  They are just designed long enough to fit the text and the images.

Figure 1 - Layering of the symptoms animation

In addition, PartSelect posted a lengthy, thorough post about the interactive infographic development process they went through.  This is fantastic!  While I may not agree with all of the decisions they made along the way, this type of transparency and under-the-hood information is what helps build credibility and trust with customers.

The Interactive Infographic Process

The process now looks like:

1. Project Manager decides to make an infographic with some data.
2. Project Manager brings on board a Programmer and Designer.
3. Project Manager must decide on the balance of technology vs audience, based on discussions with the team.
4. Designer fleshes out some rough concepts.
5. The team meets to discuss; each has specific input:
   1. Project Manager: vision and potential target audiences.
   2. Designer: design concepts and how to make it clean.
   3. Programmer: what is possible. Ideas based on what the technology can do which PM and designer may not be aware of.
6. Designer creates fleshed out design.
7. Team meets again and iterates over designs until everybody happy.
8. Programmer puts together technical spec on how it will be built, which will influence deliverables from designer.
9. Designer sends across deliverables decided by programmer.
10. Programmer builds the first functional version.
11. Team meets and probably iterates and refines design in same process.

Thanks to Stephen for sending in the link!

The Socially Optimized Business

Attributes of a Socially Optimized Business is a new, visual XPLANATION from the Dachis Group after acquiring the XPLANE company.  You can view it in SlideShare (they should have put it into Prezi), or download the high-resolution PDF.

What’s a Social Business? It’s a business alive with energy and big ideas. It’s collaborative, authentic, customer-centric, trusted, open and real-time.

And it’s about time. After decades of mechanistic, process-oriented management dogma, progressive organizations are waking up to the disturbing truth that they’ve squeezed all the creativity out of their business. But when companies embrace organic, passionate, socially-savvy initiatives, they blossom. That’s Social Business.

This would make a great poster!