Creating Personas for a New Product

My Role: UX Researcher
The Problem
The company I was working with didn’t have user personas in place to tailor their products and marketing efforts. Personas needed to be completed to better understand our target market.
The Research Question
What are the needs, motivations, desires, and demographics of our target market?
Methodology
Since development of our product was already in process, I had to use mixed methods to obtain the data to create user personas in a timely manner. I decided to use both quantitative and qualitative data in order to create user personas. The methods I used were survey research and semi-structured interviews.
In designing survey questions and an interview guide, I was tasked with working with a number of key stakeholders within the company. I had the task of making sure key questions were answered while also designing the questions in a way that participants wouldn’t become fatigued. Once key questions and topics were discovered, I took the time to write the questions that would result in unbiased answers. I used Qualtrics to design and deploy the survey.
Recruiting Participants
Due to time constraints and a decent budget, I decided to use a third party panel to recruit the survey participants.
For semi-structured interviews, I used local communities that I believed best represented our target market to recruit people to talk to. I used screener questions that would allow me to weed out participants that didn’t match our user hypothesis.
Data Analysis
After the data collection was completed, I started first by analyzing the quantitative data. I wanted to understand the “what” behind users’ thoughts on our product category. To understand the “what,” I segmented the data based on key behavioral characteristics of the respondents. This took a lot of experimenting with slicing the data to find insightful patterns. Once I understood the “what,” I then moved on to the qualitative to understand the “why.”
For the analysis of the qualitative data, I identified patterns from the interviews conducted. The “why” wasn’t found in one sitting. It took some time to develop the why and refine it until I was confident with the data produced.
Persona Creation
From the findings, I then grouped patterns together to form three personas. All of the personas had some overlap, but each persona had a very distinct “what” and “why” that set them apart from the rest of the personas.
Buy In
After my research was completed, I then presented the personas to the team of stakeholders. The different departments I presented to were then able to use the personas to better engage in their work and evangelize the personas with their teams.
