A lot of work goes into development of user personas, a form of qualitative research that identifies key user types. It’s an important exercise because it helps to facilitate empathy for a user and provides focus to specific needs the software must address, rather than adding features that are easy or seem like they might be useful.
But after all the work of developing personas, too often they get filed away somewhere in a deck, saved to who remembers where.
The best practices around personas all seek to find a way to make them memorable and material. For example, posters of the personas in conference rooms or other workspaces are considered one way to ensure they remain a constant point of reference.
A remote workforce presents a new paradigm for collaboration, and physical personas posted in a workspace no longer are immediate enough.
At Arcules, a cloud video surveillance startup, when it came time for us to compile personas we were faced with the fact that our entire team was remote due to the Covid pandemic. So how could we provide personas that would be a ready reference to help stakeholders focus on user problems?
The answer to our new-world problem was an old-world solution: physical printed booklets. Personas would not be hidden way in a file somewhere on a hard drive, but rather compiled in an attractive printed booklet that could remain on the desk of every stakeholder, product, engineering, business and design.
The process of compiling these personas involved many steps:
- Review of sales personas from the startup founding documents
- Interviews with Arcules sales team
- Interviews with our customer council
- Interviews with select users
- Competitive research
Image: Unsplash, Finan Akbar