How we crafted Ton: Personas — Part 1
Started from the bottom now we here…
Back in May 2019, I was working on an artificial intelligence software called Stilingue and I was also doing a project to a company in the Cayman Islands as a freelancer when I received a contact from Stone Co. and at that time I didn’t even know that they exist, when I get the contact about “a big challenge in an extremely fast-growing company” I get interested to know more about it. During the interviews, the mission was pretty clear “We have a product running but we don’t know anything about the people that are using it.” So I thought that could be a big challenge for me.
My main challenge was Stone Mais, an MVP that was running for 9 months to prove if the business model works or not, but as an MVP Stone Mais had thousands of doubts and questions and the main question was: WHO THA HELL ARE THE USER? so along build a design team my first task was to discover who’s my personas.
Personas are probably the most common term in UX design, looking through blogs and articles you will find thousands of expressions about it like “Know who is your user”, “Burn your personas”, “You don’t need personas, you need users”, “Users are the new personas” and so on. But in fact, you can advance with UX without knowing your user so with all of this in mind this project started.
First things first
With a 9 months MVP running I knew that I already have a LOT of content to jump in, also I had the business Leader who will be a big character in this story, he has some researches about the market, product fit, prosecutions, and all business model document you could imagine so merge all this data was my onboarding on the business model, plans, ideas, business market e etc.
Stakeholders & Interviews
After get all that data and start an Airtable for it I’ve started the interviews with the Stakeholders, this part was crazy because I’ve never seen people that were so passionate about their product, they feel for the user more than you could ever imagine and sometimes in Stone Co. you feel this energy in every corner of the building.
During 6 days I’ve interviewed 8 Stakeholder to see what they feel, see, love, hate and enjoy about this product and user, the result was weird at least, they understand who was the user but they just never meet the user, all the info was matching between than but at the end of the day they were just disconnected from the real users, but it was good to see this lack of knowledge even from people that we're so into the product.
Phone Calls
With the interviews merged on Airtable, it was time to listen to some calls, with a 9 months product running I had access to a library of phone calls at our customer services, basically, I had 300 hours of audio to hear and merge into the research board and to make this painless I just downloaded everything and let they play on my phone while I was doing my day by day tasks.
Proto personas
After this loooooong journey, I was already an expert about the users' pains and complains, but it was time to consolidate all this data and show to the stakeholders that they knew a little about the users and also show the first stage of the personas project.
At this phase we’ve made a presentation for the 7 proto personas, we also made history for then, explaining what the like, what they don’t like about the product, how was their financial profile, if they have a bank account or not and so on. It was a huge moment for the whole team because we’ve created the visual version of the user’s and the team started to get more involved with the result.
To see what happened next check out the PART 2
