Creating User Personas

The Problem  

Solving user pain points requires a deep understanding of who your users are, what their needs are, and what motivates them. At OpenIDEO, an in-depth study of user personas was previously conducted in late 2015. Within 1.5 years since the last round of user personas was created, OpenIDEO had grown substantially as an online community and business; as the platform grew, so did the makeup of the target audience. To improve product experiences, we needed to refresh our understanding of who we were designing for.

The opportunity to invest time into refreshing our user personas came with the redesign of OpenIDEO.com. Since the frontend rebuild would impact the growth of the platform and business as a whole, it was essential to re-establish the understanding of our target audience.

The Goal  

The goal of the user personas was to help us design the best user experience for the new site. Specifically, the personas would provide insight into how the new website can convert potential users into registered participants and curious sponsors into viable partnership leads.

The Approach

The refresh of OpenIEO personas was developed over 1.5 months via 5 phases:

1. Explore Questions: The deep dive into user research was an opportunity to prove or disprove some of the underlying assumptions we had about our target audience. To clarify the learning objectives, I created a research plan of exploratory questions to uncover findings. The questions were specific to uncover insights without prescribing biased answers.
2. Choose the Interview Methods: A combination of quantitative surveys and qualitative phone interviews were selected as the primary research methods. Community surveys would identify broad demographic and professional segments, while user interviews would uncover deep insights about user behavior and motivations.
3. Recruit the Right Users: To be mindful of capturing the right mix of perspectives, I recruited from a broad range of users based on their professional background and familiarity with OpenIDEO. I.e., in addition to capturing responses from frequent participants, it was also essential to seek out the unique perspectives of new users and 'super' users.
4. Conduct Research: Over 1,800 participant responses were captured from a survey sent to the entire OpenIDEO community. A diverse range of 50 participants was then selected for in-depth 1-hour phone interviews.
5. Synthesize Findings: The data collected were then condensed and synthesized through a series of workshops where I led the team to identify patterns from across the research. Compelling themes and characteristics surfaced were finally distilled into personas that represented collective images of our target audience.

Project Snapshots:‍