The purpose of personas: captivating stakeholders and making sense of the product
Persona development is a very common practice in UX Design. But how many of us (UX/PD/Researchers) stop to reflect on the purpose of personas throughout the development of our projects? And yet, how many of us take the time to make that purpose explicit, and present our personas to the team and stakeholders? In this text I seek to contribute to these reflections with a brief experience report.
Working as a UX Research consultant at Thelke, for a foreign health company, with the initial objective of “redesigning the application”, we had multiple challenges, such as: overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers, and demonstrating the purpose and value of carrying out a research step before delivering some “prettier” screens.
During the alignment with the stakeholders and the desk research phase, the lack of clarity of them about the users of the product (which existed for about 5 years) became increasingly clear. Despite dealing directly with these users, there was nothing to represent them, and the system was designed from a clinical point of view, very important for an application in the health area, however, not representative of who actually used the product.
Considering the specificity of the area, a usual template of personas was not enough. We needed to reflect on what information was relevant to us when building a health application, such as the level of mental health, physical health, the support network of these people. In addition, we worked on stakeholder expectations about who they were reaching and who they wanted to reach.
Because we were dealing with a corporative product, it was possible to explore diverse data sources, such as LinkedIn from partner companies, data from government agencies regarding the country’s demography, and population health, in addition to exploring their database (anonymous data), before carrying out a quantitative research.
After analyzing the data, we realized that the diversity of user profiles was quite vast, ranging from people who work in high executive positions, to blue collar workers, each with their own life context, possibilities of access to health services and information, education and skills with digital technologies.
At this point, in addition to having insights into the application’s potential, the need to represent these people became clear. In all, 10 personas were developed, distributed among 4 categories according to the type of work. Even if it were possible to synthesize more objectively relevant data for the design team in four profiles, we feel that personas could be the best way to rescue the meaning of the product and guide the next steps to be user-centric.
When the personas were presented, we received feedback from one of the stakeholders, who acts as a doctor directly with the users, and he said “It feels like magic, it’s like I’m seeing my patients here”. All those 10 fictional characters contributed throughout the project, especially in the ideation process, with brainstorms where each participant assumed the role of a persona, studying it, its empathy map and user journey before proposing ideas.
And that’s how the personas fulfilled their purpose in this project. Rescuing the meaning of the product, captivating stakeholders, demonstrating the value of the work carried out, and humanizing the research and design process.