Personas
Role: UX UI Designer / UX Researcher / Product Designer
Human-Centered Design
As a product designer, my primary goal is to design around the real people that use our products. To ensure that our product serves a purpose and improves the lives of our users, and if you’re not currently a user, as soon as you see or hear about our product you will become one.
To make this dream a reality, we needed the buy-in of every person on the team. Daily, we each make decisions that impact different parts of our product. These decisions can seem small or behind the scenes, but eventually, it makes their way to the end-user.
User-centered design theory enables our team to design for successful end-user interactions. Personas are a tool that helps build empathy with users’ behaviors, attitudes, needs, and goals so that we can separate from our biases and design around our target audience.
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Data and Mapping
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At TruU we worked closely with groups of users at Stanley Black and Decker, Gilead, and Coinbase to better understand their mentality when accessing company resources. We conducted 35 quantitative surveys and created visual representations of the statistics. In conjunction, we conducted 20 user interviews and we used sticky notes to create an empathy map; measuring severity with different colors and calculating consistency with quantity.
Using the data from our interviews and insights from our empathy map, we identified patterns and we were able to establish 3 archetypes that represent our users.
Personas
Buyer Persona
The first persona represents our buyer. This is someone that is looking at our product to fill a need at their company. This is usually a chief security officer that needs to improve their current security service. Their primary motivation is to improve company security with minimal change to current infrastructure and they are limited to products that fall within their budget.
Influencer Persona
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The second represents an influencer. This is someone that is a leader at the company. They may have a director title, manage a group of people, or be an individual that is seen as a leader among colleagues. They are motivated by the long-term benefits and they are willing to put the work into changing habits because the end goal is very clear.
General User Persona
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The third represents the majority of our end-users. This person is the most difficult to please. They are focused on their roles and they experience amplified inconvenience when mundane procedures get in the way. They are impatient and easily frustrated when asked to change their habits around technology. When things do not work as expected they are quick to lose faith and never return.
Iterations and Evolution
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Our goal is to harmonize with our users and to do so, we must stay in in tune with how our users are evolving. We maintain contact with our interview participants and take on new feedback whenever possible. When we see shifts in our user’s goals, expectations, and difficulties we update our personas to be an accurate reflection.
Collective Creation and Utilization
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To motivate the company to utilize personas we got as many people involved in the creation as possible. We shared the feedback from our users; qualitative analysis of feedback, quantitative statistics on use, and impactful quotes. Together, our team worked on empathy mapping which helped us step out of our daily roles and truly understand what our users were thinking and feeling.
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We created graphic representations of each archetype. We gave each persona a name and a background. We outlined their motivations and built a person that we can all relate to; a person with a life outside of the benefits of our product.
We printed out posters to put on the walls. We added personas to a shared space on Confluence. Each team used these personas to develop journey maps and evaluate areas for opportunity.
Conclusion
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We pride ourselves on sharing our discoveries through demos, emails, and conversations. Personas are more than a design tool, they are a critical part of company culture; impacting how we relate to users, evaluate our product, and collaborate.