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Personas optimized for a remote workplace

Prominently featuring personas in a physical workplace aids adoption. But what about a remote team?

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
Front cover of the Arcules user persona booklet
The booklet had to be able to explain the purpose of personas for those who just picked it up, who may have never attended an introductory presentation and had no familiarity with UX principles.
The head of security is the most frequent user of the application, maybe even the majority of the day. This user needs to be able to configure setting on an ongoing basis as needs change.
The facilities manager was a typical user for an SMB, but the application use was not very heavy. This persona needed ready access to progress metrics, not day-to-day working within the application.
In a small business, this persona is involved on a daily basis with a simple security setup. Because she juggles many responsibilities, she needs to be able to get in and out of the application quickly to address a specific concern.
One of the heaviest users of the application is the actual security person. Some stakeholders were surprised it was not “a guy with a gun,” but none of our research indicated that was a typical user.
The persona in charge of IT was not a day-to-day user of the application, but did need to access trouble-shooting features and was the main user for setup.
The video security industry is heavily mediated by integration companies. They are often the ones who recommend a vendor and design the setup. Integration needs to be seamless to satisfy the one-time needs of this persona.
Always credit the creatives!

Image: Unsplash, Finan Akbar