I built proto personas and a nine-phase journey that showed a whole company who buys, who uses, and who decides.
A work management software company needed one shared picture of its customers. I built five user types, a learning grid that plots attitude against learning style, a detailed Creator persona, and a nine-phase journey from first impression to daily reliance, and the same model shaped the onboarding and upsell work that followed.
Client
A work management software company
I changed names and details to respect my nondisclosure agreements.
My role
Product design manager
Focus
Proto personas and the customer journey
Result
One shared model of five user types and nine phases
One person found the product, but a whole team had to use it.
In the fall of 2016, I led research and design for new user onboarding at a work management software company. A single account usually held several kinds of people. One person discovered the product and set up the work, teammates filled in the details, managers read the reports, leaders glanced at the progress, and an administrator managed security, billing, and users.
Product management had already sorted every account and user type by license. A license explains what a person may do, but a license does not explain what a person needs, how willing the person is to learn, or how the person prefers to learn. The teams that designed, marketed, and sold the product needed that second picture.
I started with what the company already knew. I spent four days on stakeholder interviews and organizational research, gathering what product, marketing, sales, customer success, and business intelligence had learned about new users. Then I ran a one-day off-site design thinking workshop and turned the findings into proto personas, a psychographic grid, and a journey map that anyone in the company could read.
Five user types, two questions, and nine phases became one model.
Each piece of the model answered a different question about the people inside a single account. Click or tap a card to turn it over.
The Creator holds the whole account together.
The Creator is creative, analytical, reliable, and hardworking. The Creator usually finds the product, tries the product, and asks for the budget to buy the product. The Creator then sets up the system that contributors, consumers, and glancers use. When a Creator leaves a company, the product often goes unused.
The Creator is slightly more willing to learn than most people, but nobody can predict whether a given Creator wants to be shown or wants to explore. So the design had to support both styles at every step. The Creator's three pain points shaped every later decision. Too much information arrives at once, time is always short, and getting a team to buy in and comply takes real effort.
- Centralized, so every project lives in one place.
- Scalable, so the same tool grows with the team.
- Flexible and customizable, so one tool fits many kinds of projects.
- Collaborative, so teammates can do, track, and see the work.
- Controlled, so each teammate sees only what the teammate needs.
- Visual, detailed, communicative, and easy to roll up into an overview for consumers and glancers.
Where the journey ends
My work starts and stops with Haven Works, and I can't work without it.
The CreatorProto persona, Rely phase
Meet the five user types and walk the Creator's journey.
This interactive version of the persona model uses fictional names and the Haven Works name. Every need, feeling, and time target comes from the original proto personas.
Things to try
- Open each of the five user types, and read the Creator's full profile.
- Choose an attitude and a learning style on the grid to see which kind of help fits that person.
- Ask where the Creator sits on the grid, and notice why the design had to support both learning styles.
- Step through the nine phases of the journey with the arrow keys or the Next button.
5
user types, from System Admin to Glancer
4
learning quadrants, each with its own kind of help
9
onboarding phases, from first impression to daily reliance
The personas gave every team the same picture of the people inside an account.
The model was small enough to remember and specific enough to design against. Click or tap a card to turn it over.
Personas work best when everyone can use them.
A persona earns a place in a company when product, marketing, sales, and support all reach for the same picture of a customer. If your team needs one shared picture of who buys, who uses, and who decides, I would be glad to talk with you about building one.
There is plenty more where this came from.
Names, brands, and data in my case studies are changed to protect my clients.
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