Meet the Personas
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Objectives & Goals
The product is a complex b2b platform offering stakeholders and media insights targeted at mainly users in the external affairs function. Adoption of the product was low as most users were relying on their customer success managers to deliver insights to them. To know our users better, personas are an essential first step. With this knowledge, the team will be able to understand why user adoption is low, make better design decisions and design personalised onboarding experiences to increase activation and adoption of the product.
In order to do that, the following information needs to be understood:
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Goals and challenges of the users
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Triggers to use the platform (if any)
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What keeps users engaged on the platform
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Aha moments on the platform
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Frictions faced while using the platform
Deliverables & Responsibilities
10 interviews were conducted with users from 10 organisations to form 3 personas (including one core persona).
I was responsible for the following:
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Planning and coordinating exercise
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Crafting interview questions
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Conducting interviews
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Analysing interview insights
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Constructing personas
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Validating and advocating use of personas
The Interview Framework
The persona interview framework was conceptualised after speaking to all the customer success managers and getting a first level understanding of the user's goals and challenges and a glimpse to how they use the platform.
Besides understanding the inherent desires of the users, I understood that it was also important to find out the user's platform behaviour and to discover the triggers and what motivates/demotivates them from using the platform.
As seen in the framework below, good catalyst are motivators and accelerates the usage of the platform and bad catalyst are de-motivators and deccelerates the usage of the platform.
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Interview Framework​
Interview Insights
All user interview were recorded, transcribed and uploaded onto enjoyHQ. They were then analysed and organised using affinity mapping, where common themes of insights were grouped together under 5 main sections - user goals, user challenges, trigger, good catalyst, bad catalyst.
Affinity Mapping of Interview Insights
TOP INSIGHTS REGARDING USER GOALS
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I need to build, develop and maintain relationships with key stakeholders for partnership and collaboration.
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I need to obtain enough of the right intel to ensure my team and i make the right decisions and achieve favourable outcomes.
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I need to manage and be updated on risks that could potentially affect the organisation.
TOP INSIGHTS REGARDING USER CHALLENGES
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I have limited information regarding topics, countries or stakeholders of interest which might prevent me from making informed decisions or taking the right action to impact the organization positively.
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Our company was very much affected by COVID which resulted in changed priorities and restriction in many business activities.
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It was difficult to discover connections between key stakeholders and get an overview of potential threats when things were done manually previously.
TOP INSIGHTS REGARDING TRIGGERS
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I use the platform before, during and after engaging with key stakeholders.
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I logged on to the platform because of a newsletter / notification sent from the platform that caught my eye
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I use the platform to stay up to data regarding an important issue or stakeholder activity that I was made aware of which might affect the business outcomes of the organization.
TOP INSIGHTS REGARDING GOOD CATALYST
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I appreciate the support and guidance of the customer success managers that help shorten the learning curve and make me understand and appreciate the platform better.
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I appreciate that the data on the platform becomes more sophisticated through regular usage and by adding company knowledge.
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The platform fits into my current / new work stream / workflow
TOP INSIGHTS REGARDING BAD CATALYST
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My team/I am unsure how to utilise the platform to add value to their/my role, especially at the initial stage of utilising the platform.
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I am not able to use information on the platform as it is because it is inconclusive, not useful and there are too much noise to sieve through.
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I am unable to control and customise the type of data that is supposed to be consumed by the different type of users on the platform.
The User Personas
How were the Personas Utilised
After the personas were created, they were validated with the organisation, and the customer success team gave them stamp of approval.
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The user journey map of the core persona was then constructed and it was used to help the product team make sound design decisions for new features to aid user adoption and create a personalised onboarding intended to activate new users by guiding them to their aha moments.
Challenges Faced
It was challenge to get a variety and a good amount of users to participate in the interviews.
10 participants is simply too little to create enough insights for 3 robust personas. Only the core persona, the Engagement Strategist was substantiated by enough data. Creating the other 2 personas was a stretch and more interviews needs to be conducted to validate them.
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Also, those that were interviewed are mostly moderately active users. It would be great to interview users at both end of the spectrum (users who are very active and not active) to understand if any interesting patterns emerge regarding their usage patterns, goals and challenges.
Next Steps
As it has been about 1 year since the personas were first formed, an evolvement in the type of users is expected due to the inflow of new users and retirement of existing users.
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It is about time to start working on version 2 of the personas. I noticed that are definitely some goals and challenges that are common within the different users today and updating the personas will definitely help when it comes to prioritisation of new product features and making more informed design decision.