User personas helped change the product road map and features
Summary
When I joined the team the users' of the product were not clearly defined. The belief was the primary users were small business owners, mainly cafes and restaurants. I was unsure and wanted to test this idea by interviewing and observing users.
I organised and facilitated workshops with senior stakeholders to distil and analyse the interviews to identify behaviours, challenges, problems, and attitudes that characterize users and show there was more than one category.
The outcomes were significant. The roadmap changed, new features were prioritised. Sales targeted new types of businesses and business owners. Marketing changed the messaging around the product.
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Super useful for multiple reasons - can be used to help inform our marketing messaging & content, sales efforts, customer experience and developing & prioritizing enhancements
VP, Data and Analytics
Goal
Understand who uses the product and why they pay for it
Hypotheses
There is more than one type (category) of person using the product. Creating personas will clarify and highlight the differences between types of users.
Introduction and context
The team did not think about the users of the product. New features were developed based on requests from sales and marketing teams. My role was to design features that helped users get jobs done and introduce frameworks and concepts from user-centred design.
User personas, while not perfect helped with some of these issues. In my experience teams that do not think about the end-user usually:
- Think the user is elastic i.e. while making product decisions different stakeholders may define the user according to their convenience
- Engage in self-referential design i.e. team members may unconsciously project their mental models on the system design which, may be very different from the primary user
- Do not think about the end-user as a human
Personas were based on user behaviour and circumstances that forced them to act
Interview goals
The goal of the interviews was to understand why users pay for the product and what reasons caused them to act? Interviews were an exploration tool I used because I had very little knowledge of who the users' of the product were. The interviews were open-ended, but all participants were asked 6 specific questions. All team members had input into creating questions, in the end, we selected the questions that best helped us accomplish the interview goals.
A marketing company were engaged to complete the interviews. They spoke to a completely random selection of users. It took a month to complete and interviewed 12 users.
Discover common themes and insights
I used dovetail to organise all the interview transcripts. I had an open mind and tried not to have preconceived ideas about user behaviour. I went through each transcript and tagged, highlighted and classified comments and behaviours. I combined and separated categories as needed over time themes and insights started to form.
Other team members also completed the same process which helped to validate the findings. I ended up with many different perspectives on the problems and circumstances. Together we agreed on the most common themes.
Workshops to understand who uses the product and why?
I organised workshops with senior stakeholders to develop a shared understanding of the user and introduced user-centred design concepts and frameworks.
The process broke down the interviews into common characteristics and created a persona of an average user who shared similar behaviours and characteristics.
Example of a workshop whiteboard
The team picked one persona, on post-it notes listed all the behaviours they had in common, all that they did not have in common and what made them different. For example, there were a few ways to look at the single store owners; one large store with many employees and items for sale or a tiny store with only 1 or 2 employees and few items for sale. The process generated many notes.
Example of a workshop whiteboard
The team started grouping common post-it notes. Combining the characteristics of the different groups was hard. There were many notes and where to start seemed impossible. Just by putting the notes on the board slowly some started to clump together, it was possible to see different categories emerge.
In the final part of the process, each stakeholder created a persona based on the categories developed by the group, gave them names fleshed out pain points etc.
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Being able to share thoughts with each other also provoked additional ideas and concepts that I doubt we would have come up with individually
VP, Marketing
Outcomes and results
At the start, the conventional wisdom was all users were small, single businesses. They were mainly restaurant and café owners the type of business was important and affected how they used the product.
I changed this understanding of users.
- The type of business was not that important as the challenges of running a business were the same across all different types of industries
- Most users owned more than one store. (account creation data confirmed this). The road map changed features to support and make life easier for multiple store owners were prioritised
- Sales changed who they targeted i.e. broadened their search from service industry (café and restaurants) to any business owner
- Marketing changed its messaging to target store managers and marketing/finance managers. Previously messaging focused on the small business owner
- The persona name became very useful for having focused conservations. Discussions around new features were framed around who (the persona) got the most benefit
Feedback from participants on the workshops
Business owner persona
Marketing manager persona
Single business owner persona
Store manager persona