Mar 5 - Lecture Notes: Ego aside (UX research)

Using personas to facilitate an aligned, selfless collaboration - Laura Martens, Toyota Connected Europe  

You need to share personas across an organisation to:

• speak a common language, 

• challenge biases, and 

• break down a company’s vision to make it more actionable e.g. a vision to be greener and more sustainable could be considered from the view of personas. 

Generally speaking, personas are not prioritised by organisations but are key to the long-term vision and staying on track. 

Ideally personas should be presented as part of the onboarding process and available to employees, for example in a database of personas that are accessible for all and show how insights relate to these personas in the form of stories. 

These personas can be explored through immersive workshops (pre-pandemic this was done via role-plays) to put teams in the minds of these people; co-creation scenarios; and by using immersive methods e.g. video, to communicate these personas, their issues etc. 

It is best to gradually introduce personas into an organisation, outline where they came from and continuously pivot, learn and improve upon them. 

You need to encourage all the stakeholders to ask questions from the persona point of view. Give the stakeholders the tools and guidance to be able to apply personas to projects, and help them scope projects. Make these personas actionable. 

There does needs to be a limit to the number of personas that you use. They can be an average but you can also use outliers. It is a balance. 

It is best to have a UX representative within an organisation to take on the responsibility for these personas. 

Talk about these personas every day and keep them alive. Advocate for them and keep referring to them.

Bring them to life!

Because personas help us predict the future, be inclusive and fight our biases.