User Persona Training

Client

Workpath organisation
(all teams)

UX Researcher

My Role

Credits

UX Team Lead
Persona actors

Timeline

June 2022-
September 2022

Tools

EasyLMS
Miro
iMovie
Unsplash
PowerPoint
Zoom

Skills

User interviews
User personas
Video editing

The brief

Review the current key user personas and, using the research already performed, create a more consumable format for all Workpath teams to get more easily familiarised with them, so that the personas can be used more efficiently and under an organisation-wide common understanding.

The problem is…

“

Our organisation has defined key user personas to support development of a more user-centred product, but they are not well-known and so there is often uncertainty about who we are building for and what direction it should take.

“

The extended context

In early 2022, in partnership with an external agency, the Product Managers, Design team, and UX Research team were due to collaborate in workshops on updating and publishing a more concrete set of company Design Principles. The key user personas would be a key contribution to this update. The Chief Product Officer requested that UX Research present a lighter, more user-friendly version of the current key user personas to support these workshops.

The originals

Whilst user personas and buyer personas had previously been developed at Workpath, and could be found on a Miro board and in some slide decks, they were not often being referenced day-to-day.

The names of our key user personas did not seem to have a real resonance with Workpathians, or with whom that we could feel empathy towards. Considering all Workpath teams had access to, and heavily used, demo accounts with dummy data when presenting the Workpath platform to prospects, or when showing new features to current customers for example, it seemed to fit that our personas “profile” be connected to the demo accounts with matching names and profile pictures. 

The names

The mood

The next step was to collect inspiration from tried and tested formats and templates for presenting User Personas in a more engaging and digestible way. So I put together a mood board to suggest some ideas in discussion with the UX Research Team Lead.

The new and improved

  • The original slide

    The first step in condensing the information we already had, was to transfer this to a different format. We chose to move it to PowerPoint slides.

  • The first iteration

    Next, we needed to restyle the format to appear more digestible at first glance. This is when we introduced a new name and image, icons and emojis.

  • The second iteration

    The goal of the next iteration was to emphasise the humanness, and highlight a quote of what this persona would say, whilst reducing the heavy detailed text. Labels for icons were also added as it was suggested that their meaning may not be clear.

  • The third iteration

    The third iteration fleshed out the details some more as the previous version in fact lost some context with reduced text. This version was used during the Design Principles workshop.

  • The fourth and final (for now) iteration

    In keeping with the company’s overhaul in brand look and feel, a final iteration took all of this into account and now continues to be used.

The training

Now we had established a final usable iteration of what we called our User Persona ID cards. During the Design Principles workshop we saw that the Product Managers engaged well with this final iteration and it helped them to work through the process of redefining the Design Principles.

The next step in this project was to configure a training so that we could spread more knowledge of the key user personas and test the Product org on what they’d learned. Our goal with the training was to ensure that the revised user persona format was learnable and sustainable. The training was configured on the EasyLMS platform

An intro video was created by the UX Research Team Lead to give a background as to why we use user personas, how they benefit us, and how they would appear in the grand scheme of things on an org chart

This included a snapshot of an organisation chart, which we worked on together, that gives an overview of where our personas fit in the grand scheme.

In the hopes of making our key user personas more memorable, we requested some colleagues to act as our personas, we prepared a script for them to follow in a question and answer format, and recorded “interview” style videos to be used as learning material in the training.

A short video summarising the ID cards was also added.

The test

And then we put our trainees to the test with multiple-choice questions that included real-life quotes from some of our users and trainees were asked to select the correct user persona, kind of like ‘Guess Who’ game. A short bloopers reel was added to the end of tests for those who passed, to add a bit more lightness. Each successful trainee received a certificate to complete their experience of the training as a reward and thanks for their participation.   

The extra reach

Whilst we at first wanted our product organisation to become really familiar with the key user personas, we also wanted to encourage the rest of the company to get more familiar with them also so that everyone would be speaking the same language and so that the personas could be universally referenced in cross-functional meetings and initiatives.

The Learnings

About the personas

There was always a question of whether one key persona was missing from the pack, but with the nature of the product and the specific roles that we served, and already having three key personas (with additional personas living in the background), it was difficult to determine whether another key persona should now be added. It was decided not to focus on it now, but I did have a fear that we were bypassing a crucial one. Happily, the use of the personas lives on past the training, with Product Managers often referencing them in meetings or in feature development documentation. Personas were also implemented into other processes such as feedback categorisation, in user interview tagging, and other company documentation.

About the training

All of the Product Managers took part in the training, and were successful with it. Soon, other team members on the product teams were taking part and other Workpath teams were requesting access to the training for their own teams and for newcomers to the business. Over one third of the company went through the training successfully within a month which we considered a win. In general, the reputation of the training became very popular and it was said that it was one of the most user-centric and enjoýable trainings to date.