UX leadership

Personas & Design Practice Evolution

Building user-centeredness into an org, one persona at a time.

 

 

Context

  • 2016.

  • Alaska Airlines’ UX design team did not have a shared understanding of its users, and several user segments were not adequately considered in design work.

My role

Head of UX, AlaskaAir.com

Goals

  • Establish a shared-understanding of who Alaska Airlines must design for.

  • Enable user-centeredness throughout the Alaska Air organization.

 
 
 

process

I started the process with a series of working sessions with stakeholders to review existing data and begin to organize data around customer segments using a spreadsheet:

We started with customer data that was readily available: demographics, average number of trips, income, etc. We then did research to add additional personal information to the personas: name, place of work, etc. From there, we co-wrote a high level, one sentence summary of each person. Next, a designer and writer crafted a rough draft of each persona which was reviewed and edited (which I reviewed and edited). A visual designer then took over and crafted the final look-and-feel, including creating an additional set of baseball card-sized personas.

 
 

data analysis

At right is a spreadsheet I created describing key attitudinal and demographic data for what would become 6 personas. Sorry it is obscured--it is protected by NDA.

static1.squarespace.png
 
 

resulting personas

 

sample persona

Content of the persona is obscured to protect IP.

The personas were produced as a document as well as baseball card-sized summaries. (Regrettably, due to NDA I cannot share the final outputs in high resolution)

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outcomes

This project was a great example of cross-divisional partnership. As is typical with most larger projects I undertake, I sought to not only produce a meaningful artifact, but to use its creation as a means to get teams to work more closely together.

stakeholder feedback

After building the personas I piloted them on a key enterprise project. Afterward I measured the efficacy of the personas on that project via a survey with stakeholders. Stakeholder feedback to the personas was extremely positive. Here are a few samples:

"I would recommend using personas on projects going forward"
100% of respondents agreed with this statement

"The personas are helping me focus on customer needs on my project"
75% of respondents agreed with this statement

"Personas are a useful tool when creating a new service or experience"
100% of respondents agreed with this statement

 

Finally, here's what two designers said about the use of the personas on this pilot project:

 

"Especially during design [the personas] have been very valuable and
has helped the team focus on the target customer."

-- UX Designer

"We need to design for a wide range of users, so having
a breadth of personas covering our customer base is extremely important."

-- UX Designer