Empathizing Through Personas

Raising Companywide Awareness for Infusionsoft’s Target User Personas.

 
 
 
 

Demonstrated Competencies:

Design Leadership & Visual Design

Year Completed:

2014

 

Objective

Conduct primary research to uncover the most prevalent target users in the customer base and develop user personas that help employees empathize with top user needs

The Story

Mid-way through Infusionsoft’s history, the product development team created the first set of clear user personas that really helped the fledgling organization understand who they were targeting and why. It had been almost four years since these personas were updated and since their creation the number of employees had almost tripled. Many of the new recruits didn’t have a sense of who we were targeting, what made them unique, and how to identify them. They did however, have a connection with the free cereal that Infusionsoft was known for having as an employee perk. While the research into the personas was an cross-departmental effort, I came up with the idea of using giant cereal boxes to communicate the user personas in a fun, engaging and memorable way.

We had two weeks to design and print five different boxes so that we could debut these boxes at our annual user conference as a signpost of sorts for our “Meet the Product Team” booth. Not only did we deliver some seriously awesome looking boxes, we learned a lot about what it takes to create effective personas. Namely:

  • Personas aren’t all that helpful unless their strategically relevant to your product and acquisition strategy
  • Taking an exhaustive research approach to personas is expensive and often unfruitful. Only gather the information that is relevant to the problems you’re trying to solve and the benefits you’re trying to deliver
  • Focus on calling out criteria that differentiates the users from each other and tie user estimation back to your TAM
  • Don’t make the mistake of confusing your buyer personas with user personas unless they are indeed one in the same!
  • Work Lean and fast! Big up-front research is often wasteful. Defining the target user as a hypothesize and iterating over time is a much more prudent approach