Enterprise User Personas

There is a lot of reference material our there to design, pleasant, reusable, and scalable, e-commerce experiences for the average customer. Whether you conduct surveys, A/B tests, or competitive analyses, there are usually bread and butter patterns that you can leverage to attract & keep a target audience. Think of your standard shopping cart experience, it may look slightly different everywhere you shop but it generally has the same number of steps and asks for the same information. Now let's say there is an item in your cart, how did that item even become available? How was it even on the website to begin with? 

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That's where the enterprise side of e-commerce fits into the equation. Most likely, the item in your cart is provided by a supplier - a third party business that has a partnership with a company (like Wayfair) that provides a platform or website on which to sell their products. At some point, this supplier had to manually add/maintain the product information for the product in your shopping cart. Your ability to purchase that product and the number of products available for you to consider purchasing, depend on the amount of time and effort it takes a supplier to provide this information.

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If your goal is to sell more products, one of your smaller goals might be; add more products to your site, to do that - you need to make sure the supplier's experience is as pleasant, reusable, and scalable, as your customers. Where to begin? Who do you focus on and why? Furthermore, how do you get an entire department of people, who are used to working in silos, to understand and agree on who to solve problems for?

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This is where user research can help. I recently faced this situation in my current role, company was reorganizing and needed to redefine a few areas of focus for the business. As a result, people were shuffled and brought together to create new teams whose mission was to solve the problems in these new focus areas. Our teams largest problem was we lacked a a unified understanding in who our users were. To help, I partnered with a UX researcher to gather existing research, identify the gaps, and select research methods to close those gaps. Our main goal was to leverage the knowledge of our product and engineering partner, previous research, and new research to develop user personas that could be leveraged by all scrum teams responsible for working on supplier facing tools.

Once we had had gathered the existing data/research from our peers, over 200 surveys were sent out to suppliers to identify/recruit users for virtual/in-person interviews. Over 30 virtual/in-person interviews were conducted. Once we synthesized the research using collaboration tools like Miro and Trello, we brainstormed rough outlines of about 7 personas. We reviewed those persona outlines with several scrum teams to collect thoughts and feedback, refining them to create 5 final personas; 2 primary, and 3 secondary. (see more below).

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I created the final artifacts using a software called Xtensio which allows me to track how many times the artifacts have been opened and saved. Additionally it only tracks new views not repeat views. Since the artifacts have been created they have been viewed 103 times and saved 22 times.

While these personas have had some success in supporting local scrum teams, the next time I approach tackling something like this I would push for a broader outreach. The personas have helped us align on who we are solving problems for but it has also shed light on areas we have yet to scratch the surface on in terms of user goals and pain points. By casting a wider net or even doing additional rounds of outreach we could have captured a wider range of suppliers.

Something else to be considered, we could have decreased the time it took us to synthesize our research would had we researched and pitched access to a user research platform such as User Testing. In total it took over 40 hours to synthesize the results.