Shared Knowledge
Role: Research planning, execution, and analysis
Chats among stakeholders, engineers, and customer support, revealed that everyone had their own idea about who customers were and how (and why) they used our product. Engineering didn’t have the context around who they were building for.
Avoidable misunderstandings dogged feature discussions. And most importantly, it created obstacles when trying to align business priorities with customer needs.
Goal
As the sole UX practitioner, I felt that we could bridge this divide by establishing and adopting customer personas rooted with real customer research. Moving forward, new and old employees alike would have a shared understanding of our customers, along with increased empathy towards their needs. The expectation was to use this as a building block rather than a silver bullet.
Selling
I scheduled a meeting with key stakeholders to present the case. The presentation laid out the situation, the process, their involvement, and the potential value. In the end, we got the green light. 🚦
Recruiting
The plan was to interview 3–4 individuals from each existing customer type (based around company size) for a total of 15–20 interviews.
To recruit customers, we placed an announcement within the product, which led to a short survey. The responses were used in the selection process and allowed us to see how customers self-identified vs. our internal categorization (mainly based on raw numbers).
After around 60 responses came in, I organized the data and met again with departmental stakeholders. As a group, we narrowed down the list to what we felt would be a representative sample of the existing customer base and sent out the invites.
Prepping
Now it was time to plan for the interviews. This process began with best-practice research on both crafting interview questions and conducting interviews. I then added a summary of learnings to a shared Notion folder for anyone else in the company that may be interested. This recap included a shortlist of tips to keep in mind when talking with users.
Next, we needed to craft questions around the insights we were looking to gather. As part of our UX personas, we wanted to learn more about each participant’s: environment, daily routine, pain points, motivations, goals, and what job/s the tool helped them get done (and how). A general line of questioning was created as a baseline, and depending on the answer; we could jump off-script to go down any interesting tangents.
Before each interview, I would watch session recordings of the participant to understand how they used the tool. I would then review the individual’s screening survey responses and tailor the interview script around that particular person.
Listening
Each session was a 45-minute video call with myself as the interviewer and an observer taking notes. Following each interview, the observer and I would quickly debrief to document any fleeting insights and ways to improve the interview process. Below were a couple of things learned along the way.
Being transparent
Our first participant reached out shortly afterward, concerned about the nature of our questioning and what we intended to do with the information. This reaction led us to update our messaging in the calendar invite and the interview script. We better clarified the goals and content of the interview and how our team would use the data. These updates seemed to put the subsequent participants at ease with the process.
Ending on a high note
The original script wrapped up with questioning around “existing needs.” We noticed this line of questioning at the closing made it feel like we parted ways on a negative note. The simple change of closing with “personal goals” completely shifted the sign-off from awkward to optimistic.
Of the 20 participants initially selected, we ended up with 12 completed (and 2 partial) interviews. Ideally, we would have done a couple more, but we also felt good with the trends uncovered. After some discussion, everyone agreed to move forward with the current sample.
Synthesizing (Take 1)
Involving stakeholders in each step of this process is generally recommended for successful adoption. With this in mind, my initial attempt was to schedule an affinity mapping and UX persona workshop with stakeholders.
After getting the room prepared and spending a couple of hours cutting out every little piece of data, we got to work. About 20 minutes into the session, I quickly realized it was going to be a total bust.
The primary failure was trying to complete the affinity mapping exercise and persona creation in one fell swoop. This decision made the process very convoluted and confusing.
The second issue was the disconnect between what was on the cards and what individuals outside of the process assumed they represented. The problem was then compounded by the instruction to bucket them within the individual persona groupings.
After seeing this was not going in a productive direction, I decided to pause the exercise. Being intimately knowledgeable about the research, the group suggested that I complete the initial analysis of data and reschedule another meeting to walk through the findings.
Synthesizing (Take 2)
Leveraging the giant data set, I started connecting the dots across the participants. I hoped that by talking through these insights before building out the UX personas, I could keep them feeling like they were part of the process while also seeing the research behind the decisions.
While presenting these insights to key stakeholders, one person asked, “Don’t we already know all this stuff?” Followed by another chiming in, “I didn’t know a lot of this stuff, and I bet most of the other people in the office don’t either.” That singular interaction seemed to perfectly capture the situation and underscore the need for this project.
Building
By integrating these insights with existing customer data, our personas began to take shape. Distinct commonalities helped to clearly identify our primary and secondary personas. Then, one more unique use-case pushed us to create a third and final persona.
I then adapted the many customer experiences we collected into vivid (evidence-based) scenarios. We knew customer segments and use-cases, but no one had previously explored customer pain points, anxieties, motivations, and goals. Reading through the finished UX personas, it felt like you could now envision and empathize with their situation.
Adopting
Did we complete the goal? Yes and maybe.
We completed the task of delivering some evidence-based UX personas. The second phase was to gain companywide adoption to close the current knowledge gap.
It has been a couple weeks since sharing and presenting the finished research. The personas have been added to new employee onboarding materials and are being mounted to the wall. I’d say half the employees are willing to give it a shot, and at the very least, the presentation had a positive impact on the existing knowledge gap. The reception has been promising, but I also know that adoption will be a struggle without top-down buy-in.
I will continue to do my part, name-dropping personas whenever appropriate, and turn this into an annual process, tracking customer needs over time.
What did I learn…
While I’m not at liberty to share what was learned about customers, I can share was learned on a personal level.
Through researching and interviewing, I learned how to ask better questions and catch those seemingly insignificant comments that lead to the real issue at hand.
During the planning stages, I was reminded of the great amount of time and effort required for recruiting, screening, scheduling (and rescheduling), and interview preparation.
And certainly not a new learning, but its importance cannot be overstated. Product teams cannot understand customers and their needs through feature requests and bug tickets.Getting them on the phone/video/in-person provides so much more context, empathy, and insight towards solving the right problems.
What would I do differently…
Bringing everyone along for the ride is worth the extra effort. I would make sure that stakeholders along with employees from each department be observers during customer interview process. I don’t think you create that true empathy until you see and hear a real customer face-to-face.
That’s all for now. 👋