Creating Personas for the BT Design System
Katharine Johnson, user researcher, writes about the importance of personas, the process for creating them, and how it’s helping in the creation of the BT Design System.
What is the BT Design System?
When you hear the name BT you may not know that as an organisation we actually consist of multiple different consumer brands — BT, EE, Plusnet, plus other B2B business units like Enterprise and Global. As an organisation we have grown and expanded rapidly, especially in our digital teams, and this has left us needing a clear and consistent digital design system to be used by our teams.
The Loop design system squad was set up to help BT create a design system, with the mission ‘to create a single place to find visual styles, common components and guidelines for designing our user interfaces, and a way to use them in digital products and prototypes’.
With this mission in mind, the Loop team approached their user researchers to ask for some personas to be created, so they could ensure they were building the right thing for their users. By creating personas the Loop team are better able to understand who their different users are, what their needs would be from a design system, and how they currently work in their day-to-day role. By understanding users existing pain points in their day-to-day roles the team can ensure that the design system addresses these issues, so they are bringing benefit to their users.
So how did we do it?
When creating the personas we were in a unique position of knowing exactly who are users were going to be. It would have been easy to just rely on our assumptions to create them, but if you learn one thing as a researcher it’s that you can never know your users well enough — even if they are your own colleagues. Therefore our approach was based on two important criteria: that we only use data that was gathered from our real users, and that we wanted to keep the personas focused to what they are trying to achieve in their day-to-day job and what prevents them from doing this.
We conducted 13 interviews across the business speaking to Content Designers, Product Designers and Developers from each brand. During these interviews we focused on the daily tasks our users are trying to achieve, what their main obstacles are and how they are currently trying to overcome these.
To analyse the findings, we used a technique called empathy mapping, which helped us easily track themes across the different job roles and brands. We created 13 identical boards for each participant, and these were divided into six sections.
The main part of the board helped us identify the common goals that each user was trying to achieve, in order to understand the context in which their pains occurred. The bottom two sections focused on the pains — the frustration points that prevents the user from getting their job done — and gains — the desired outcomes and benefits that the user wants from a design system.
What we have to show
In the end what we created were three different personas: a Product Designer, a Content Designer and a Product Engineer. These matched the roles of our users across the four different BT brands. From the research we found that while our users worked across different brands, ultimately they were all trying to achieve the same goals. Having these personas has helped the team better understand their users and the main goals they are trying to achieve.
How were they used?
As the design system is in the early stages of being rolled out, the team are using the personas to help create their onboarding plans. The personas are being used to identify the needs of each role, so that written content and video materials can be tailored to their needs. The personas have also helped when onboarding new members to the team, as they give a quick overview of our users and their needs and help them understand the aims of the project.
Do you have experience creating an internal design system? Share your comments below on how you carried out research with your users to understand what their needs would be.
