How we created global end-user personas for Gympass

When I arrived to be the first UX Researcher in Gympass, in October of 2018, I found a complex product. For me as a researcher, it was inspiring!

So I thought: “Imagine how many things I will have to discover for a product that is a three-sided marketplace, with three different main users, that operates in 14 counties… WOW! And on top of that, that is starting to build a UX team right now… That’s huge!”

I was right, it was pretty huge! And because of that, I found myself in the biggest challenges of my career as a researcher: How would I deliver a knowledge base about users, that captures all the nuances and complexity, as quick as possible, for the product development team to work on?

First things first! If you need a clear vision about how our users are, I’ll start by defining the Gympass product personas. And this is what this article is about. You may be thinking right now, “why didn’t she started saying that instead of wasting my time with these two paragraphs introduction?”

I did that because the most important step in any research is to understand the context to define the right methodology and framework. I’m seeing a lot of designers and researchers, even product managers, building personas in the wrong way.

So lesson number one: PERSONA ≠ PROFILE

A user profile is primarily based on demography data or in smaller steps of the product journey. Profiles are commonly used in marketing or user growth because it delivers important results of conversion and other valuable metrics.

But personas are documents that describe fictional people, based on the results of research with real people. Personas are a consolidation of characteristics that represented and synthesize common behaviors that showed up in that context.

So, I needed to create personas that were global. And that can be easily expanded and improved, which means that all the other discovery processes that would come next should merge with this first definition about how is our target while coding and designing Gympass. Because at that moment, things were quite open and arrangeable.

For that, after all the qualitative and quantitative methodology I ran to have insured to create Gympass personas, I needed to find the most important variable for our context. And It ended up being: the propensity to practice physical activities. In the end, that was pretty much what matters to make a user start with Gympass, right? And from that, all the demography information and other useful data could vary per country.

Because no matter what country or culture we’re talking about, we’ll always have people that love physical activities and other people that can’t handle it, for example. Because a relation to sports and physical movement is a global and human behavior. It could be football in Brazil, martial arts in Japan, dance in India… it’s part of our culture to have a relationship with body movement. We need to understand that, behavior can help us create the right triggers to engage a person to find an activity to love.

To summarize, the research process here in Gympass was:

And the Gympass personas that came out of this are:

SPORTS LOVER — a person that practices physical activities since childhood and sees that as part of their natural habit.

GYM ENTHUSIAST — a person that just started with physical activity and it’s really on the mood for it.

FAKE ACTIVE — a person that keeps trying to start a healthier routine but is always leaving it behind because of work, family, and excuses for yourself. (I identify myself as this one, in particular).

GYM HATER — a person that is not really into physical activity, but mainly because of the association of physical training with regular gyms and weight training.

(right now we’re rethinking some terms, such as “fake” or “hater” to be less negative with some behaviors)

From that, we found the variations per country, for example: In the US, we have 54.2% of sports lovers against almost 24% in Brazil considering the survey sample as the reference. That happens because people in the US have more incentive (and I mean family, culture, government, $developed market$) to practice sports since childhood.

Translating to product development perspective: Brazilian users need more onboarding features to explore and find an activity to love. It doesn’t mean that we’ll create a product only for these users, but it means that we can’t forget about that while creating our homepage or even awareness campaigns. Having things explained is essential for all the users and it was the main good practice in UX mindset, but for us, it is a real need, in that scenario.

After that, we worked on some materials to spread personas so our team could understand better what we did and for whom they were creating and developing our product every day, that’s another benefit of having good personas: everyone works on the same page.

For now, we’re constantly improving what we know about our users and gathering more information to our personas. Personas are not a static thing, but the most solid it is, the easiest is to apply them in a long-term perspective. Conclusion: everyone in the company wins.

For the next steps, we’re creating ways to identify users as personas, by crossing information with the data team and by using quizzes and survey tools. We’re also looking deeper into countries’ particularities.

Any questions or comments, please write it below.

Thanks to everyone that participated in that project with me, especially for José Junior, Victor Tademos, Victor Garcia, Felipe Teruel, Lucas Garcia e Marcel Figueredo.