Personas: A Journey
How I spearheaded my team’s first in-house personas and empathy maps to supercharge our work 💡🚀
Challenges
Understanding our customers, their user journeys and how to empathize with their needs is difficult. Data is scattered and no one is looking for it. Solutions with clients are built around assumptions about Gen Z and their parents. Instead of discussing facts, we are throwing darts.
Everyone has a different idea of who our customer is.
Departments are siloed, so customer profiles are varied and sometimes outdated.
Clients don’t see qualitative data and design decisions are focused on aesthetics and business goals.
"No one knows what a hamburger menu is"
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"What the heck is a VSCO girl?"
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"Parents do everything for them"
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"They'll enroll if we show how we're better"
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"No one knows what a hamburger menu is" • "What the heck is a VSCO girl?" • "Parents do everything for them" • "They'll enroll if we show how we're better" •
Proto-persona Workshop
In my efforts to improve our website’s user experience (UX), me and a colleague conducted research with current students and leaned on our admissions team and agency partners for data about prospective students. We shared our findings with our team, but I felt as though I was the only person who found value in the data. So, I initiated a workshop with my fellow Marketing team members to start talking about personas. We drew from our internal knowledge to create a proto-persona for multiple audience types. This included a demographic profile and an empathy map on the reverse side.
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Educate the team on the benefits of having a thorough and unified understanding of our customer. Explore how personas help us solve problems and how they can help with client relations.
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What do we know about the demographic profile of this audience? What are their personality traits and hobbies? What thoughts, feelings frustrations and goals do our customers have relating to CMU?
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While we were still making generalizations and assumptions about our users during this workshop, the workshop allowed us to get a first-draft profile on each of our audience types. Something is better than nothing!
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Personas add an extra component to the team’s workflow, which is hard to adopt. The workshop helps generate buy-in since the team was directly involved in their creation.
Final steps
Fact-checking
I pulled the knowledge we compiled into our proto-personas and began adding FACTUAL data. I saved all data sources for later reference. This was the most important step in the process because we found out our proto-personas had information that was not supported by or final analysis.
Building the finalized persona cards
I created a profile based on our proto-personas made to help the team empathize more deeply with the customer. We gave each persona a name and a photo so we could more easily reference and visualize them in conversation. Now, we say things like “How would Madison feel about that?”
Forming new habits
Integrating personas into our workflows has not been easy. As I presented the final draft of our persona cards to colleagues, I had to inform the team on the finalized data and educate the team on how to use an empathy map within our day-to-day tasks or brainstorming sessions.
