Personas
Formulating and designing useful personas that make sense and actually help people do their job.
In Q3 of 2019 I paired with researcher Sujit Shrestha to create data driven consumer personas for Hum by Verizon.
My Role
During this project Sujith and I planned and facilitated workshops and designed persona artifacts. We followed a 7 step persona creation template inspired by Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt's book "The Essential Persona Lifestyle." Our goal was to make sure that at the end of this process we had achieved alignment with stakeholders while ensuring all persona attributes were data driven.
Workshops
In 3 months we organized 39 ( 😲) workshops and consultations with stakeholders to:
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Make sure they understood the purpose of personas and how they can directly benefit the customer experience.
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Ensure we understood our peers as users and how we could provide the best product (personas) possible.
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Facilitate a trustworthy environment that made stakeholders comfortable and familiar with the personas.
Sujith eloquently describes this process from a research perspective here.
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During the very first workshop of this process we spent 10 minutes on an icebreaker. We asked participants to make a list of what they would pack for a trip without telling them necessary details of where the trip was to, how long it was for, etc. Naturally, this was a difficult task. After a few minutes, we let participants know this was a mountain camping trip. Then they adjusted their list according to the framework of information they now had. We used this as analogy of building a product without having personas. It's not impossible, but it's more effective with all of the details.
Design Artifacts
I designed three key artifacts for the unveiling of the personas.
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An interactive persona website (example). This was the most detailed of the deliverables and included links to the VZC google drive with research, photos, and other information that supported the personas.*
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Life size posters, printed and placed around the office so team members can easily refer to them daily.*
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Google slides with high level information about the personas that can be added to presentations and Lean Product Playbook decks.*
*All persona deliverables shown are example layouts. Persona content is proprietary and property of Verizon Connect
Other Work
