Who's Your User?: UX Personas

We had not updated our personas in more than 2 years when I joined the team, and they only accounted for users who were shopping along a particular path. Our design teams struggled to find data about our users that was specific to digital and had to interpret data into assumed behaviors. There was a delay and disconnect with how the data was shared, so designs were built on assumptions. To guide our scrum teams, I created 5 base UX personas using this template. Each persona created was based on customer insights and post-purchase data from our research partners, so we knew that each persona wasn't just made up to fit into who we wanted our customers to be. The personas were then used to humanize the end user for the digital experience team – now everyone knew who we were solving for. We even adjusted the style of user stories to specifically call out which persona would benefit from the work that sprint.

I worked with our data & analytics partners to consolidate our customer trends from marketing, but also dug into our post-purchase customer data. We segmented data based on actual purchases, so we could understand how our current digital customers bringing their device, adding a line, or upgrading a device differed from our assumptions and from our retail demographics.

We created 5 base personas based on purchase decision, focusing on key lifestyle and demographic data that would influence user behavior. We shared those with our digital experience team and our customer experience and marketing partners. We worked on educating on the importance and use of personas, and set expectations on when to create new ones or adjust the current ones. After sharing with our product owners and leadership, we started to change how our scrum teams wrote their user stories. We led with our persona and identified how our story would connect with their needs and motivations. We also committed to regular shakeouts of user trends and data so that our digital experience team got all the information they needed.

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Key Results:

• User trend data transparency

• Shared differences in retail vs digital users

• Changed user story style to incorporate personas

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