Persona development

Problem: An international FMCG manufacture was redeveloping their intranet.

They needed to educate the development teams around the globe about typical intranet users. That way new functionality on the intranet could be developed with the end user in mind.

Exploring intranet users

Process: Amberlight ran focus groups and one on one interviews with client employees to establish the main user types.

The user types were fleshed out into draft personas, with job and personal descriptions together with a number of “dimensions” (such as facility with English and technical competence) that were common to each persona.

The draft personas were discussed and refined during a series of client workshops.

The personas were then visualised with posters and flash cards.

Bedding-in the personas

Solution: Once the personas had been developed we needed to ensure that the client would be able to use them effectively.

We therefore arranged an initial workshop where the personas were tested by being used to develop a small number of real-life services.

Confident that the personas were capable of doing the job they had been designed for, we were then able to run a final workshop where we could brainstorm ways of bedding the use of the personas into the organisation and agree responsibilities for taking those actions forward.