Personas require you to distinguish between customers and users and define their relationship with your product. Customers are the people that pay for the product and make the ultimate business decisions around its use. Users are those that interact with the product most often. My personas are the end point of this research for our payments platform.
Before this project we had not made personas before. This was mostly due to the last of resources to do the calls to gather the necessary data. That is where I came in. Since I was in a new department that was still being built out I had a lot of availability to contact users and really learn about their experience.
We started by looking at all 994 users at the time on our payments platform. We organized them by usage into four distinct groups. We created a script for each group and worked with the product manager for the payments team to make sure we were asking the right questions to properly probe for enough valuable information to justify such a large research project. We conducted all calls over the next 8 months and connected with 128 users.
Omit the Day in the life section as a cutom section that I will build out based on what the team thinks will go best there. Personas are being used to help with the ongoing Reporting dashboard project. My next step will be to build out the remaining practice areas personas.
The team (PSS) conducted 994 calls, with 128 usable connections with users on our payments platform. We Separated the users into 4 distinct groups based on their adoption metrics. We looked at users that signed up and never used, infrequent usage, consistent usage, and new users to the platform. We developed scripts for each of these groups with product managers to ensure we were collecting all the information possible. We wanted to gather intel on their expectations and needs throughout their life on the product. Researching the payment experience was a massive undertaking.
To digest data I employed a checkbox to help pick up on trends. Any answers that fell into one of the categories was marked. Detailed notes from each conversation were also kept for detailed information on an individual user’s responses.
As we completed calls we had a bi-weekly sync with the product team to talk about trends that we were seeing. We wanted them to be involved in the project so that they could begin working on mvp’s for users as soon as possible. As we stopped hearing new feedback we would pivot to the next group to begin calling. Once a group was finished, data was tallied and broken down by practice area for more insights into their specific use case. I verified practice information with their website to ensure that we did not muddle the data.
Once all the data had been analyzed I began building the personas. I wanted to start with the top three practice areas that are on Mycase. I will be working with our UX team to build out the rest of our practice areas in the near future.
