Persona Research
The research highlights inconsistencies in persona management at Bentley Systems, emphasizing the need for a unified persona template and centralized repository, and outlines a four-stage programme to improve persona usage through better collaboration and standardized templates among various teams.
Overview
The Problem
Different teams within the organisation use varied workflows and tools for persona management. This siloed approach leads to inconsistency and inefficiency, ultimately hindering our understanding of users. There is a general lack of collaboration and low visibility caused by siloed work and inconsistency in cross-functional collaboration.
The Goal
A staged research programme to help get deeper understanding and areas of improvement in the current persona templates, and give recommendation of persona hosting tools through qualitative research, quantitative data, and competitive analysis.
96%
ranked single source of truth as top priority
7+
persona templates found across teams
88%
ranked understanding user goals as top attribute
The Solution
- –Week 1 - Set-up: establish research plan and stakeholder alignment.
- –Week 2-4 - Fieldwork: conduct user interviews (N=21) and internal survey (N=36).
- –Week 5-6 - Analysis: affinity mapping and synthesis of findings.
- –Week 7-8 - Reporting: present findings and tool recommendations to leadership.
Process
Fieldwork and competitive analysis across 50+ colleagues globally
Fieldwork - understanding current challenges
- ✓Conducted user interviews with different user groups (N=21) and an internal survey (N=36) across UX, Digital Experience, Product Management, and Marketing.
- ✓UX teams: lack of confidence in current personas due to lack of validation; need for regular updates through a robust validation process.
- ✓Digital Experience teams: insufficient access to persona templates set by product teams; need for a centralised persona repository.
- ✓Product Management: over-reliance on own industry background; need for inclusive persona creation with diverse team insights.
- ✓Marketing: inconsistent persona templates for customer messaging; need for standardised templates and improved resource accessibility.
- ✓Created affinity maps to summarise common pain points and areas of improvement across departments.
Competitive analysis - evaluating persona hosting tools
- ✓Conducted user interviews with product managers across different product lines (N=9) and a 2-week pilot with a selection of teams to test tool functionalities.
- ✓Created a weighted scoring model rating 5 tools across 8 criteria based on their rankings in the survey.
- ✓Identified strong candidates for further business evaluation by the executive and operations teams.
Reflection
My Contribution
- –Used both qualitative and quantitative research methods to validate hypothesis on the need for a single persona repository and template.
- –Narrowed down tool selection to a few strong candidates for further evaluation.
- –Used research data to inform strategic and business decisions.
Challenges & Takeaways
Tailor communication by audience
Working with 50+ colleagues globally - from junior designers to the CTO - I learned to tailor interview questions and distill research outcomes into formats suited to each stakeholder.
Research drives strategy
Persona research directly informed tool procurement decisions at the organisational level, demonstrating the impact of rigorous mixed-methods research.
Feedback
Great summary of tool selection. The key is to have one tool for both!
Brilliant work. So useful! So well executed. What a star!
This is really inspiring and will help us a lot!
Summaries that you put together have been so incredibly helpful for us to be able to make a decision on personas, or at least pivot some of our predisposed thinking.