Personas for ii

Project overview

Product: Inspire Interactive (SaaS and Flex [On-prem] versions)
- Subset: Front Office, Content Author
Year(s): 2020-2022
The team: 1x PM, 1x TPM, 1x PO, ±15 devs, 2 UID, 1x UXR (me)
Time frame: 3-6 months
Benefits: Informed key decision making, improved customer relations.

The product in question

Inspire Interactive (ii) is Quadient’s comprehensive customer communications management (CCM) and document composition bundle consisting of applications designed to create, manage and deploy customer communications in various formats and through various channels.

The tool’s been successfully adopted and became a key driver across various industries (Banking, Healthcare, Finance, Asset Management, Postal Services, Energy, to name a few). It covers multiple functionalities and was designed to be operated by multiple personas. Before we dive into those, let’s quickly elaborate on the individual subset of tools:

Front Office enables clients to receive and respond to their client’s requests received in the form of tickets.
Content Author enables the creation and management of personalised document templates and other communications.

Who’s it for?

These personas were established pre-dating 2020:

Field agent
Office Clerk / Writer
Sr. Writer / Support Team Lead
Template Designer
Sr. Template Designer
Supervisor / Content Manager
All-in-One
Insurance Specialist
Contract Processor
Client company admin
Integration Specialist (aka PSO, a person from Quadient)

Illustrations of work relationships

Problems to tackle

Not only were these too many personas to consider (the golden rule would be up to 10, i.e., fewer are better, easier to recall and maintain), but more importantly, they were severely dated. No business should develop software without staying conscious of actual needs of the target groups it aims to serve across various industries.

The challenge

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

It was early 2021, the midst of a global pandemic that changed our lives and redefined how we work. Part of my integration was to identify areas for improvement within the company. The company’s outdated approach of contributing to the product roadmap considering customer feedback was one of them; personas, in particular, not receiving an update in well over a decade.

To assume we know everything we could possibly know about our clients at any point in time is fundamentally wrong.

Our everyday experiences support the fact that change is the only constant, thus with former Head of UX & Graphics we set to revive an old project codenamed User-centered Design Hub (UcD Hub) to focus on reinvigorating connections and change how we interact with customers, ultimately change how we approach design and development.

My (research) plan

Objectives

Reach out to internal stakeholders to learn about client contacts
Contact representatives on the client’s end
Introduce our initiative and set the right expectations
Interview users to understand their context, use cases, workflows and pain points
Obtain qualitative (non-measurable, non-statistical) insights
Involve users to take part in usability studies to help test products before they hit production
Distill insights into actionable items
Create personas
Product roadmap: Consult the data with product management and decide on the next steps

Expected results

Get customers to participate in future studies, test new software iterations, contribute to development with insights;
Learn more about their context of use of our product(s);
- Understand the roles and connections between them;
- Build a better profile of target users as an end result;
Make sure all stakeholders are on the same page, gain better understanding of the customer, and make more sound decisions (with fewer iterations) in product development;
Build and maintain customer relationships and loyalty, make customers feel like part of the team.

The method(s)

Because we can’t make solutions for clients without them we chose user interviews as the primary method to learn more about our clients and acquire data that would align us with their objectives of use of our products (i.e., detailing their workflows and expected cases of use).

Sixty insightful minutes 🎙️

It was lovely to speak with our customers in a very friendly fashion—similar to the way you’d meet your friends in a cafeteria for a chat about what’s new.

For 60’ we sat down to talk Their Story, with emphasis on specific tasks a person working in that segment would be assigned. We asked them to describe their workflows, to get a good glimpse at what is being used, in which order [it comes in], for which cases of use and how. We aimed to understand their motivations, and potential blockers on their way to success—the bits that can ultimately help us make better things, craft better experiences.

✅ This helped to form an image about who our customers are; and understand what drives them, what they hope to achieve, and how we can help them achieve their goals.

Tag, (you’re) it!

Dovetail sample

🔴 Sessions were recorded with consent. Customers spoke candidly. Insights gleaned are stored in Dovetail🕊️ in form of transcriptions extracted from video recordings, and transcribed insights segregated into categories. Data was transcribed twice to provide a shorter digest focused on key highlights; to distill actionable insights.

Focus on 3 main categories

Insights and contextual data to develop personas;
Use cases;
Issues.

👌 Not only is this kind of research valuable to form an updated perspective about our target audience, due to the limited exposure to clients (common to B2B environments) I formulated my research in a way so I could obtain other valuable insights, like frequent cases of use and issues encountered. We would then follow up with clients on these matters.

Outcomes, outputs & takeaways

Outcomes

Outputs

Personas have been created in 3 versions:

A contextual deep dive (longer reading, encapsulating everything necessary);
A bulleted version;
Posters hanging around offices (even the front of a bathroom door) for recall.

Contextual (deep dive) version

Clients (Full).pdf

Clients

Project Manager (Full).pdf

Project Manager

Part time approver (Full).pdf

Part-time approver

Correspondent (Full).pdf

Correspondent

Integration Specialist (Full).pdf

Integration Specialist

Content Author (Full).pdf

Content Author

Content Administrator (Full).pdf

Content Administrator

Department Director (Full).pdf

Department Director

Bulleted (lite) version

Clients (Simple).pdf

Clients

Project Manager (Simple).pdf

Project Manager

Part time approver (Simple).pdf

Part-time approver

Correspondent (Simple).pdf

Correspondent

Integration Specialist (Simple).pdf

Integration Specialist

Content Author (Simple).pdf

Content Author

Content Administrator (Simple).pdf

Content Administrator

Department Director (Simple).pdf

Department Director

Stakeholder takeaways

🗝️ Context is key.
🤝🏻 Customer contact is everything. Not only is it vital to be in the know, it’s the relationships that matter the most. Customers can forgive any quirks in the software given the company’s approach is good, but if they feel neglected, you can be sure they will turn to your competition instead.
🤲🏻 "There are no facts inside your building, so get outside." —Steve Blank. This realization compelled management to reconsider testing with internal users and focus more on the domain expertise “outside of our building”.

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