Best in Catgory: Expressing
Interaction Awards 2024
Across the globe, User Experience (UX) Research teams invest months in user interviews and weeks in crafting a set of Personas. A User Persona, is a detailed and semi-fictional representation of a target user, based on research and insights. Yet, these Personas often fall short of their intended impact on UX and products. We embarked on a mission to enhance Personas, ensuring they deliver their true value in understanding users and facilitating exceptional user experiences. After numerous iterations, we developed the Persona Mapper—a tool designed to revitalize Personas.
Personas have the potential to profoundly affect the lives of users who use products designed with Personas at their core. To gain insight into the importance of Personas and where they fall short,we conducted interviews with Senior UX professionals and Product Decision-Makers worldwide.
Our findings show that for Personas to succeed, they must be comprehended not only by UX Researchers but also by UX Designers responsible for product design, and product decision-makers creating product roadmaps —essentially, all teams engaged with end users through various touchpoints. Achieving alignment around user personas is essential to creating groundbreaking UX and product experiences.
In summary, our research reveals that:
- Personas drive user-centered experiences.
- Accurate user understanding leads to user-aligned and relevant features.
- Only products aligned with users succeed.
However, Traditional Personas come with these challenges:
- Lengthiness discourages most teams from reading them.
- Attributes in the Personas lack prioritization or importance ranking.
- Time-consuming creation hinders timely action by design and product teams.
- Comparing multiple personas requires constant scrolling between pages.
- Developed in isolation by UX Researchers without collaboration with other stakeholders familiar with users.
- Rarely updated once created.
- Not embraced by all teams, often seen as a routine process.
Learning this, we embarked on a mission to enhance Personas, ensuring they deliver their true value in understanding users and facilitating exceptional user experiences.
After numerous iterations, we developed the Persona Mapper—a tool designed to revitalize Personas. With BuildUX’s Persona Mapper, you can:
- Create personas 20x faster by simply listing the personas, attributes, and their weightage—no need to manage layouts or colors.
- Condense personas by creating a single list of attributes shared across different personas and assigning weightage / importance to each.
- Create and compare up to 10 personas at once, making it easier to assess attribute importance across personas.
- Assign statuses, teams, or individuals to each Persona Section or Attribute for action.
- Prioritize attributes for action, enabling you to focus on the most critical features.
- Automate Persona analysis, presenting important persona attributes,Persona scores, and similarity scores.
- Foster effortless collaboration by involving all stakeholders in persona development.
- Keep personas up-to-date and dynamic to adapt to evolving user behaviors and demands.
- Align the entire organization around Personas, helping every team member understand the organization’s mission concerning its users.
Persona Mapper was launched on 1st September 2023, and it has already garnered significant interest from over 30 highly experienced UX professionals from renowned companies. We are now actively receiving feedback and witnessing growing usage.
