EuroIA 2014 Talk - End-users are not the only personas of your product or service

end users are not the only personas of your product or service by Karine Cardona 25 - 26 september @CardonaKarine euroia 2014

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As UX designers and Information Architects, you're familiar with the concept of personas. Personas are a concept and a methodology used to help design and develop products. They're basically described as "users". Specific users with specific motivations, needs, habits, goals, pain points... that help you focus on top priorities when you're designing your product, and make the good decisions about it. Users. But not only end users. As in not only customers. We may tend to forget that at some point. And when we do so, we're not able to deliver the best experience we can. Here's the User Journey Map I was to deliver while I was working for a mobile CRM company. I took in consideration every touch point I could find, in every stage of user engagement, from awareness stage to advanced use. On the final User Journey Map I delivered, there's only one change: right before the release step, I added the red part "partners integrators". A very small detail on the map, but with a very important effect on the user experience. This company product is a mobile CRM solution, based on an SDK. It collects data and enables you to send push notifications campains, and to target specific mobile users. So It comes with terrific features. And obviously, the personas the product manager had in mind were features based. Now, with a product based on an SDK, customers experience and use really starts after a very important step : their mobile app release, embeding the sdk. What happens if integration goes wrong? Everything can be ruined… All your efforts would be useless. No matter how great the product is, no matter how much energy you put into a cool UX/UI design , customers won't be able to use it properly. And who do you think they're going to blame? Probably your product itself, not the techy part of the process they're not even aware of... This is where a very important user appears: the developer in charge of the SDK's integration. He is not an end user, he's a third-party no one ever knows about, but he's so important in the steps leading to use the product that I decided to add him to the personas I used, and that I focused on him for a start. With a new set of personas, we changed priorities. Before adding new features to the service, or improving some, we focused on the integrator specific journey: - what can we do to avoid app releases with a poor integration? - how to help third-party techs to do the best job they can using the sdk? This wasn't a secondary matter anymore: this unexpected user was the key to lead customers either to doubt about the product itself or to start enjoying it. Don't forget to stay open minded when you start user reasearch, be aware of any third-party that could interfear with your customers experience, and if you service depends on them, include them in your personas so you can make the most of it. Remember to always focus on users. All of therm