F@#$ User Personas

Waterloo Salon 5-6

We will present a case study that details our approach for replacing user personas with user roles for a multi-national SAAS company. We will take the audience on a journey that starts with an executive request for personas, travels through the tribulations of realizing personas suck, and concludes with convincing others to accept a new and innovative way to understand the people who use the product. Our key message is that personas lack real value for organizations that already understand the importance of empathizing with users. Building user-centered products requires easily accessible and well organized user insights. We will discuss defining users through a process of stakeholder consultation and content review, and structuring data around Jobs to Be Done and product interactions. We will also discuss the dissemination of user roles in our organization using relational databases, interactive dashboards and online wikis. Spoiler alert, our stakeholders loved user roles!

Entry Level UX Strategy