Ad Hoc Personas
Background
A customer (CMS) had existing personas, but they and the data they were based on hadn’t been updated in 1-2 years. The personas they currently had reflected a legacy system state, not recent years’ updates to the system. Nor did they have a process to maintain, or clarity on how to use them in product decisions. As priorities changed, the personas did not. So they weren’t helpful for teams to use in framing or decision-making.
My Role
As the UX Researcher responsible for refactoring the personas, I identified an opportunity to operationalize them. The customer’s organization was shifting to a product team structure, which aligned work demand to product areas of the system. Advocating for personas, the customer’s leadership saw business value in updating them in time to support the new team’s early work and responded well to the proposed project.
Outcomes
I refactored and operationalized outdated personas into dynamic personas with validated research data feeding into them. I formatted a guide showing the team how personas could be used at various stages of the software development life cycle and with decision-making. The dynamic personas helped the team understand their users, gain confidence about user research as a practice and trust the relevant data within the personas for developing future-state features.
In 90% of research, design and leadership meetings post implementation, personas were utilized as a point of reference. They were socialized a lot, which was great for high-level visibility. Leadership even dedicated time to present them during kick-off meetings. The guide proved to be useful and the updated personas were fully operationalized within 2 weeks.
