Corporate-wide Personas
Developing corporate-wide personas required unifying widely disparate personas from various teams into a cohesive, strategic framework.
Overview
Developing corporate-wide personas required unifying widely disparate personas from various teams into a cohesive, strategic framework. By synthesizing insights from multiple departments, I identified common themes, aligned user needs with business objectives, and created a standardized set of personas that foster consistency across the organization. This process not only streamlined decision-making but also ensured a shared understanding of key user groups, enabling more effective product development and cross-functional collaboration.
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
Project Team Lead
COLLABORATORS
Corporate Marketing
Customer Success
Product Management, VP
Software Engineering, VP
IT Director
UI/UX Director
UX Researcher (CoE)
Interaction Designer
METHODS
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Mural Workshop 1: define an initial set of personas
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Mural Workshop 2: create assumptive personas
Process
Consolidated Personas Across the Organization: Gathered personas from various teams, resulting in a total of 50 unique personas to analyze and standardize.
Facilitated a Mural Workshop: Led a collaborative workshop using Mural to create an affinity diagram. Identified and merged duplicate personas, removed
outdated ones, and developed new personas to fill critical gaps, ensuring a streamlined and relevant set for organization-wide use.
Reviewed the affinity diagram: to define key persona attributes—identifying the essential data to collect for each persona. Also refined role classifications, ensuring personas are accurately structured and aligned by job roles for consistency and usability.
Developed a standardized persona template and collaborated with stakeholders to review, refine, and finalize the design, ensuring alignment with organizational needs and research objectives.
Facilitated a Mural workshop to guide collaborators through the process of creating assumptive personas. Participants added sticky notes for each persona attribute, discussed their relevance, and used a voting system to prioritize. The top 4 to 5 attributes were selected and integrated into the final persona template, ensuring alignment and focus on key characteristics.
The image below showcases a completed assumptive persona. Moving forward, all subsequent research involved collecting participant data and applying it to this persona, transforming it into a data-driven, dynamic resource that stays relevant and current.
Impact
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Unified personas were adopted organization-wide, enabling consistent use by all departments, including development and product teams.
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Their popularity led to personas being referred to by name, becoming an integral part of the company's culture.
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They served as the foundation for all subsequent research and significantly improved recruiting processes, making it more targeted, efficient, and effective.
Key Takeaways
Leading workshops and collaborative working sessions dramatically boots the adoption of personas and related research outputs.
Active participation and understanding by collaborators ensure:
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Evangelization of personas and broader UX/UI research across teams
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Integration of personas into planning exercises, including strategic decisions and road mapping efforts.