5 personas to align the company on the users needs and frustrations

Designed for Living Sky Technologies flagship product Writeway Writer, a web app document editor that helps its users focus on their writing with smart content structures and automatic formatting.

My Roles
User Interviews
Data Analysis
Persona Designs

My Tools
Google Forms + Sheets
Figma

Timeline
1 month

intro

 

The Brief

At around the 2 year mark of Writer’s development there was an interest from our stakeholders to offer our product to a broader target audience, including: Product, Marketing, Student, Writer/Journalist/Blogger, and Law. We the Product Design team needed to determine what Writer must provide so they can meet their goals and ease their frustrations.

At this point in time we also had no concrete personas based off of in-depth research or interviews, which was a hindrance for the Product Design team.

I and one other Product Designer were selected to conduct 18 user interviews. Together we created an in-depth report outlining all our findings, and then designed 5 personas to succinctly convey our key findings for each group.

The Process

proposal

Create a Proposal

My teammate and I created a 17 page interview proposal which outlined the learning objectives, interview preparations, a 3 week timeline, a survey for prospective interviewees to be posted on various social medias, and the interview outline itself. This was created in a google document for ease of sharing, review, and commenting by our team lead.

I had past experiences creating user interview proposals, so I was able to use my experiences and knowledge to greatly quicken the writing process.

View full interviewee screener PDF here.

View full interview outline PDF here.

Once everything was approved we began interview recruitment by posting the screener survey, created in Google Forms, on various social medias, and scheduling those who met our criteria.

 
 
 

Learning Objectives

General Writing Habits

  1. How do users generally start their documents?

  2. How do users organize their ideas while writing?

  3. What features do users find the most useful for organizing and navigating between their documents?

Formatting and Styling Needs

  1. What does the document composition look like?

  2. Is having less control over formatting worth having Themes?

  3. What kind of Themes do they want?

AI Suggestions

  1. Are there any manual process the user wishes could be more efficient? What AI tools can we infer?

Collaboration Needs

  1. What does the collaboration process look like? How often do they collaborate?

Cloud Habits

  1. Do users feel safe storing their documents in the cloud?

 

interviews + report

Interview Prep + Conducting

To prepare for the interviews and have the simplest time later on when we would need to analyze the dozens of responses across 18 interviewees, we created an in-depth Google Form to record all the responses. We used Google Forms because the answers could then be exported into a Sheet and easily compared on a table and converted into various graphs.

We also completed 2 internal test interviews to make sure us and our equipment were prepared.

The interviews were then conducted in one week over Google Meets. My partner and I would take turns being the interviewer and note taker.

 
 

The Report + Key Findings

Once all the interviews were complete we had a massive spreadsheet containing all the recorded responses. To be readable we needed to greatly distill the data. We accomplished this by converting most of the data into graphs, and going through the rest column by column and highlighting remarks that were common or especially interesting. These, as well as large data points, were used to create key insights. These key findings were separated by user group, and also shown for all users.

This report was then presented by my partner and I to all key stakeholders of Living Sky, and shared on the company Google Drive.

 
 

How do all users organize their ideas while writing?

 

It is important for many users to be able to organize their notes in the idea board with headings or sections. Without structure, some would not use the idea board at all.

 

Do you use templates?

 

While most users format their documents, very few use templates. Most common reasons for this were a lack of trust in the templates accuracy (especially for academia), and difficulty in customizing the formatting.

 
 

What manual processes do all users wish could be more efficient?

 

The most common processes noted as being tedious were revisions/editing, and formatting. Specifically grammar, spelling, and tone inconsistencies, and the inability to edit templates were mentioned.

 

How do all users collaborate, if at all?

 

Most users collaborate to some extent, with a need to be able to share easily mentioned often.

 
 
 

Recommendations

Based on these and other various key insights, I was able to recommend what features should be prioritized. Such as:

  • Structure in the idea board via headings and tags

  • Theme (template) customization, focusing on colour, font choice, and font size for now

  • Grammar and spelling checker, that in the future can offer tone suggestions

  • AI tool that can give suggestions for wrapping up paragraphs, and concluding papers

  • Document sharing and commenting

 

personas

 

Persona Creation

After the completion of the report it became my task to distill the data yet again, this time into 5 personas. I used Figma to design the personas.

I pulled key quotes from the interviews for each persona to best represent them, and stories they told to convey what kind of person they are. I used the most common responses of each group to highlight their writing styles, goals, and other various points of interest. As I worked on the personas I would periodically update my team lead to ensure I was focusing on what was most important.

 
 
 
 

Reflection

Results
With these personas the design team was able to easily review them from our Figma project and use them to aid in design decisions and feature/tool prioritization. For example, soon after completing these personas it became my task to design a spelling and grammar checker, a tool which often was mentioned in the user interviews.

Quality vs Quantity
Needing to cover 5 groups over a relatively short period of time resulted in smaller sample sizes for some groups, and less meaningful insights for those groups. In the future I would restrict the number of groups being interviewed to prioritize quality over quantity.

Persona Usage
While the personas were easily accessible to the Product Design team within our Figma project, many employees outside of the team probably only saw these personas once when they were first shared with the company. Having a source of truth easily accessible to the entire company would have been the perfect place to share these personas, unfortunately this did not exist. A source of truth for high level artifacts is now a priority for me.