Enterprise User Personas
Overview
Company: DISQO
Role: UX researcher
Methods: generative interviews, workshops, user analytics
Skills: interviewing, data synthesis, workshop facilitation
Tools: Zoom, Condens, Figjam, Gong, Google Suite, Pendo, Salesforce
Deliverables: persona reports
Impact: solidified understanding of who our customers are; identification of priority customers; clearer GTM strategy
I developed user personas for the enterprise side of DISQO, specifically for the Experience Suite, Ad Testing, and Ad Measurement products. Developing user personas was a crucial step in understanding and meeting our users’ needs. The personas represented our core user groups, reflecting their primary needs, goals, responsibilities, pain points, tools, expectations, and the way they use DISQO’s offerings. By creating these personas, I uncovered relevant features and functionalities for each user group and helped the design & product teams answer the question, "Who are we designing for?"
Understanding the personas shed light on the kind of guidance, support, and templates required by different user types at various stages of their journey when interacting with DISQO. In the realm of ad testing, the personas helped identify our core user groups, understanding their needs for support and service, ascertained the value they derive from templates, and recognized those who prioritize features like benchmarking, scorecards, or statistical testing. These user personas, rooted in both qualitative user research and web analytics, helped us understand the value of standardization vs. customization across user types and provided a deeper understanding and empathy with our end users, guiding our design decisions more effectively. User personas were documented and shared to design, product, marketing, customer success, leadership, and sales teams via comprehensive persona “reports”, stored in Condens.
Objectives
User understanding: to gain a deeper understanding of DISQO’s core user groups, including their needs, goals, pain points, and expectations from the platform.
Empathy and user-centric design: to develop empathy towards DISQO’s customers and guide design decisions that are centered on the user's needs and preferences. Design decisions relate to DISQO’s survey platform (Experience Suite) — specifically the survey “builder” elements, survey templates, audience & sample experiences, and reporting & data visualizations.
Feature development: to uncover features and functionalities that are relevant and useful to each user group.
Priority users: to identify which user groups have the most growth potential within DISQO; the types of users who are most likely to use all of DISQO’s enterprise products.
Guidance and support: to determine the types of guidance, support, and templates that different users require at various stages of their research and surveying journey within DISQO's products.
Direction for development: to provide clear answers to the design and product teams on who they are designing for, aligning their efforts towards a common goal.
Platform usage: to understand how different types of users interact with and use Experience Suite, informing future developments and improvements.
Created a UXR participant CRM to manage participant data — consisting of UXR participants and customers (trial, prospects, current)
Analyzed existing customer interview data using qualitative coding in Condens
Developed and incorporated standard "persona-building" questions into all customer interviews
Conducted generative user interviews for deeper insights into DISQO users’ jobs & responsibilities
Aggregated quantitative user behavior data from Pendo to characterize DIY usage levels
Categorized users by types and levels based on usage and role (combined both quant & qual)
Conducted a workshop with stakeholders to collect feedback, review, & validate the personas
Built 9 comprehensive user persona “reports” in Condens that included data on role overview, mental model, responsibilities & skills, goals, research practices, tools & vendors, collaboration, challenges, needs & requests, support, other considerations, and a quantitative data appendix.
Approach
Validated, documented, and solidified our understanding of the types of people who use DISQO’s products (and which ones)
Updated and replaced outdated existing personas that were buried and unused by teams
Increased collaboration with new teams and stakeholders (e.g., marketing) to coordinate user vs. buyer personas
Identification of prioritized user types (AKA users from publisher companies) that helped inform organizational direction and product roadmap
Tactically identified the level of support and services different types of users need (i.e., collaboration with customer success, types of templates) via persona reports in addition to a supplementary “template” report.
Shifted the product & design teams’ ethos to designing features more specific to target user types (vs. not generally thinking about our personas)
Please contact me if you’d like to take a deeper dive into any of my persona reports!
