We will present a case study that details our approach for replacing user personas with user roles for a multi-national SAAS company. We will take the audience on a journey that starts with an executive request for personas, travels through the tribulations of realizing personas suck, and concludes with convincing others to accept a new and innovative way to understand the people who use the product. Our key message is that personas lack real value for organizations that already understand the importance of empathizing with users. Building user-centered products requires easily accessible and well organized user insights. We will discuss defining users through a process of stakeholder consultation and content review, and structuring data around Jobs to Be Done and product interactions. We will also discuss the dissemination of user roles in our organization using relational databases, interactive dashboards and online wikis. Spoiler alert, our stakeholders loved user roles!

1. FUCK User Personas
A story of UX maturity

2. Tiffany Kieboom
Lead, UX Research at Benevity

3. Greg Hallihan
Principal Consultant
at Human Insights

4. Experience Relative to
Personas

5. Level Setting
Personas are fictional characters,
which you create based upon your
research to represent the different
user types that might use your
service, product, site, or brand in a
similar way.
- Interaction Design
Foundation

6. “Personas are just one of the powerful design
tools I’ve invented over the years. I believe that
part of their appeal is how easy it is to do
‘personas’ without really doing personas. When a
well-intentioned practitioner would read a blog
and learn some bogus ‘persona’ method,
they’d soon fail. And reasonably, they
would blame personas.
Often, they’d realize what was wrong, and
recapitulate them under their own name. They’d
then write their own blog post saying, ‘[This
thing that isn’t personas that I’m going to
call personas] is really awful. But this
[personas under some new name] is much
better!’”
- Alan Cooper
Level Setting

7. International Segmentation
Whoa! Too big. Just personas
please.
Mapping Information
What do we already know?
The Ask
Do user personas, we don’t
have any and we should.
Project Progress

8. Mapping Information

9. First Iteration

10. First Iteration
Fuck personas, let’s do
something else.
International Segmentation
Whoa! Too big. Just personas
please.
Building a User Insights Hub
One thing led to another.
Mapping Information
What do we already know?
The Ask
Do user personas, we don’t
have any and we should.
Project Progress

11. The User Role
Database

12. That’s a lot of data! I’m
lost.

13. The User Role
Dashboard

14. Ellena - Benevity Designer
THAT FRIGGIN DASHBOARD
IS SO NICE TO USE!

15. Okay cool! But I’m still
a bit intimidated by
the data.

16. User Role Card Iterations
Critical
moment

17. The User Role
Cards

18. Nice! I can use this.

19. Still a risk that they
become outdated.
Make a plan to update the data
throughout your fiscal year.

20. First Iteration
Fuck personas, let’s do
something else.
International Segmentation
Whoa! Too big. Just personas
please.
Building a User Insights Hub
One thing led to another.
Mapping Information
What do we already know?
The Ask
Do user personas, we don’t
have any and we should.
Project Progress
Communicating to all
Sharing this out to the whole
product team

21. The User Insights
Hub!

22. The Full Meal Deal

23. Patrick - Benevity Designer
When I started at Benevity four years ago, I was desperate
for this type of information. It took me years of digging and
interviewing to figure out who I was truly designing for. I’m
beyond excited that this work will accelerate every single
person building our products. THANK YOU!

24. Shane - Benevity Design Manager
It didn’t take long and I already had a victory using the User Insights
Hub. Was in a meeting with a PM talking about Community
Investment users and I was able to easily pull it up and grab super
detailed information about a specific goal and tasks. This will save us
a bunch of time and work. Thank you, thank you, thank you - all your
hard work is already paying of and is greatly appreciated!

25. First Iteration
Fuck personas, let’s do
something else.
International Segmentation
Whoa! Too big. Just personas
please.
Building a User Insights Hub
One thing led to another.
Mapping Information
What do we already know?
The Ask
Do user personas, we don’t
have any and we should.
Project Progress
Where we are now
Phase 2
Communicating to all
Sharing this out to the whole
product team

26. Phase 2
Primary research
to fill gaps
● Primary research to fill in the gaps of what we know
about our users.
○ Answer questions people have
○ Validate pain points and jobs to be done
○ Validate user sentiment for our product
capabilities
● Plan strategy for maintaining the database and
updating the user role cards

27. Times are
Tough, but
Value is Still
There
● Lost research ops support
● New PMs, Designers, and contractors use it for
onboarding
● Product team uses it when starting new initiatives and
to make sure we aren’t duplicating work
● More and more people across the organization are
using it
● It’s built into the tasks for each phase of our PDLC
● Language is changing - Persona User Role

28. What we Learned

29. Where they fall short:
● Often created with good intentions, but with poor
execution.
● Can mislead people in thinking they know enough
about the user, or they don’t need to test with users.
● Can cause people to have too narrow of a focus, and
forget the rest of the target market or users.
● Are not helpful in making strategic decisions for your
product or service.
#1
Limitations
of Personas

30. Best Practises for Research & Design:
● Learning about your target market, and what their
tasks and goals are when they use your product or
service.
● Recruitment - screener questions that help you
target diverse users, and make sure you’re always
looking for people you haven’t spoken to or tested
with yet.
● Accessibility & inclusivity - building awareness in
discovery, planning to do better when designing the
solution, and building intentionally for all humans.
● Reduce cognitive load - everyone is busy.
● Use cases and scenarios that help you gain a
different perspective.
#2
What’s Better
than
Personas?

31. Research in a Product Development Lifecycle

32. Accessibility & Inclusivity in a Product Development Lifecycle

33. Do personas
have any value?
Sure, create them as needed if…
● You happen to be part of a team that struggles to
empathize or have compassion for other people.
● You are focusing on some edge cases or unique
scenarios, such as Anti-Personas, and need to
imagine the user in the scenario.
● You use the persona template to create an
“interview snapshot” after some research
sessions, to help describe the participants.
● You recognize their limitations and prevent them
from being used inappropriately.

34. Key Takeaways
1. UX has matured passed the point of
simply building empathy, and needs to
focus more on putting the empathy
into practise in how we do our work.
2. Best practises in Research & Design
are a better way to build great
experiences. Start by learning about
the people who use, or might use, your
product or service.
3. Map out what you know about your
users, and identify the attributes that
will help make decisions.
4. Learn about how your team will use
the information, and plan your
communications.
5. Plan to maintain and update the
database and any other artifacts you
create.

35. Questions?
Tiff Greg
tiffany.kieboom@benevity.com greg.hallihan@humaninsights.ca