User Profiling In This Generation

Marketing 2025 UX Research Designers, Managers

User Profiling In This Generation

We live in world where there are atlesat 5 different generations (from traditionalists to gen z), they can't be placed in one box. Even if we do create a generic profiling template for each generation, we still need to understand the particular behviors of that group in reference to the product they are using. Key metrics help push the qualitative and quantitative data gathered on the users to give the user journey much more meaning/understanding, thus reducing a lot of guess work on user needs.

Generational Breakdown

Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. These are the ones we can be blessed to say are still with us in today’s world. 6 generations are potentially the end users of your services, out of the 8.142 billion people in the world, you need to understand the percentages of each first.

Tranditionalists — The Greatest Generation (born 1928-1945) - 2%

Gen X — Generation X (1965-1980) - 16.7%

Gen Z — Generation Z (1997-2012) - 22.5%

Gen A — Generation Alpha (2013-2025) - 24.4%

Key Metrics

There are hundreds of metrics that people can be classified by, we need to narrow it down in particular to digital media consumption and its next immediate ecosystem, print media. The metrics below are generic yes, but when you stack them up against your current products (assuming its a redesign) or desired service use it does give you something to think about especially when generating content (e.g. if users are spending 30secs on your site and you have tons of content your going through have to get creative with layout to want them to spend a little bit more).

Profiling Users

Marketing, ops, designers/developers et. al all need this information, some require a different view than others (we don’t sell shoes the way we sell land just because the products interact with each other). Let’s take this site as an example, I am targeting 2 different categories of users (Experts - Designers/Devs, and Managers). The language and information they consume are completely different yet each must be catered to.

A new product feature and these are all the expected requirements from the end user to the internal team. User doesn't really care who does what, they just want the product to work as promised.

Typically the C-Suite will be concerned about most things but not about the tiny execution decisions made by the engineers.

Your ops team usually forget that there are actual human beings buying these boxes in storage, they care about flow of goods.

Juggling most of the concerns of the C-Suite and the demands of the end user, there are probably 3 other places on earth tougher than this to be caught in-between.

Heavy concern is placed on protecting the code pipeline, product uptime and repositories.

User Journeys

Literally walk it through. User journeys are meant to help product owners understand where their users come from, what their needs are (and how to handle disappointment when they don’t find what they are looking for) and most importantly assist in removing those sought after features that are just not going to be used (e.g. eCommerce in Kenya is a different ball game and so having a cart for an online fruit & veg store could be overkill).

Summary

So to recap this section: When doing user profiles always understand what metrics matter most to you and see where you match globally. As you are doing the user journeys, pay attention to which team members are part of that journey can create particular profiles for them. At the end of the process you should be able to understand which users you have, and link them directly to particular product features, so that when users evolve, features evolve; when features evolve, users build trust and user base grows.