User Research – Archetypes

Complex industries have complex personas. However, we want to focus on people, not license types.

Identifying & defining a problem

When researching user personas at a company that facilitates user generated content internationally in many highly regulated industries, it was fair to say User Personas were bound to be bountiful. However the problem presented itself when I discovered the buyer personas the whole team worked with had no women represented.

Leading the research

Over the course of a year, I facilitated and led observational and discovery workshops with our users, internal stakeholders, and consultants. When working with internal stakeholders and consultants I helped break unconscious and conscious biases by breaking up the persona “who’s” to a more “why” based conversation. In this I found four common themes that also matched what our users were saying.

Presenting these themed findings to our core customer advisory team for validation was a boon for the company twofold:

1. 1. The customers expressed that they felt heard and seen. Numerus times in customer calls up to that point it was mentioned as a frustration that the software company was not listening to what users needed/wanted to facilitate growth and adoption within their own organization.
   2. It was a simpler way for sales and our internal consultants to view users even within a highly complex and diverse user base.