F@#$ User Personas

Calgary UX is honoured to welcome Greg Hallihan, Principal at Human Insights and Tiffany Kieboom Lead, UX Research at Benevity. They will present a case study that details our approach for replacing user personas with user roles for a multi-national SAAS company.

In this session, they 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.

Their 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. They will discuss defining users through a process of stakeholder consultation and content review, as well as structuring data around Jobs to Be Done and product interactions. They will also discuss the dissemination of user roles in our organization using relational databases, interactive dashboards and online wikis.