UX Research: Personas
Personas
Since 2007 I have been the lead designer and owner of personas for Qwest/CenturyLink, Level 3 Communications, Willis Towers Watson, Johns Manville, ZOLL Data, and now Ivanti.
In each organization, personas and journey maps did not exist before I joined the team or were very under developed and not used by teams.
The Process
Since no personas existed to build from, the process of starting the build of each persona began with subject matter experts with small informal interviews and design workshops to break down our customers and users. The research then progressed to conducting story mapping sessions with key internal work groups with a focus on one or two at a time. Once we had an “assumptive persona” we were able to build a persona profile that became a living document that was built on and validated over the years with continued customer and employee interviews and project work.
Persona development has been a key to my design process. In all of my past roles, I created the base personas from scratch due to their absence before my work.
EMS Software (Healthcare) - Firefighter Persona
JOHNS MANVILLE
Johns Manville has 5 distinct business groups with very different products, uses and customers. The main task at Johns Manville was to work with the Commercial Roofing and Building Insulation groups to define, create and validate personas so as to focus on key work areas where customer experience changes within the business would impact the customer positively. These personas were used in offline and online customer facing initiatives by the whole organization.
WILLIS TOWERS WATSON
At Willis Towers Watson, personas and journey maps were needed to build out complex software aimed at HR professionals. A big focus of my work there was around Compensation Planning. To build usable, friendly software, a designer not only needed to know the user but how the user works in their field. The HR Compensation Planning Persona took two years to define, create and validate with many user interviews, feedback sessions, usability tests and SME interviews.
