Personas & customer journey

Personas are fictional characters, which we create based upon our research in order to represent the different user types that might use our service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help us to understand our users' needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. 

At PubNub, personas are built on:

• Quantitative Data: Data can be measured and expressed numerically; collected through surveys and web analytics, and usually includes age, gender, occupation, industries, and how they learn about PubNub, and landing/exiting footprint before they convert into SQLs.
• Qualitative Data: Data about qualities that are not typically expressed numerically; collected through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, and includes user needs, goals, and challenges. This information can lend another dimension to our quantitative data.

Here are some of the data retrieved from Google Analytics, Heap, and Segments, which allows me to come up with the generic profile of our personas.

The following diagnosis tools have been used to help me get to know our potential customers and learn their needs, pain points, and expectations of PubNub.

• WIN/LOST interview done by Product Marketing Manager.
• On-page "Give Feedback" survey in Docs using HotJar.
• Search queries and search logs collected using Algolia.
• Input from VOC (Voice of Customers) aggregators, the people who talk to real customers such as our AEs and Customer Satisfaction Team.
• Customer support logs.

Note: Please get in touch with me for the detailed research data and result as we consider the info is confidential.

After we defined our two personas, the next step we did was mapping out our user journey by identifying behavioral patterns from research data. 

The goal during this step is to find patterns in user research data that make it possible to group similar people into types of users. Kim Goodwin suggests a simple strategy:

• Once the research is finished, list all behavioral variables (i.e., ways in which users' behavior differed).
• Map each interviewee against the appropriate set of variables.
• Identify trends (find a set of people clustering across six or eight variables). These grouping trends will then form the basis of each persona.

At this point, we have identified the behavioral patterns of the personas. However, personas have no value in and of themselves. They become valuable only when they are tied up to a scenario. A scenario is an imagined situation that describes how a persona would interact with a product in a particular context to achieve its end goal(s). A series of user scenarios then become User Journey.

During the process, I suggested running a workshop using Affinity Mapping to synthesis the method and data. In synthesis, we're trying to find meaning in data. It is often a messy process — and can mean reading the lines and not taking a quote or something observed at face value. The why behind a piece of data is always more important than the what.

• The most common method for synthesizing UX research and organizing ideas; allows you to sort, sift, combine, and find patterns in your data.
• Also, a democratizing activity enables you to see the many ways in which people can communicate ideas and associations.

1. Write down individual observations on a sticky note.
2. Place the sticky notes on a wall, grouping similar items together.
3. Refine and label (after) the groups.

"I" statements are our interpretation of the data gathered from the user; they

1. state the insight from the user's point of view, making it about real people, not just raw data
2. will come in handy when developing a user persona as well as a problem statement.

To create an "I" statement, I referred back to the groupings of our affinity map and tried documenting any noticeable insights and trends. Here are a few examples of "I" statements from an affinity map about PubNub:

• "I want a chat solution which is plug-and-play as much as possible and doesn't have a lot of work to do."
• "I want secure messaging solutions that are easy to scale and have to be HIPAA-compliant."

Personas are powerful tools. Done properly, user personas make the design process at hand less complex — they guide the ideation processes and help designers create a good UX for the target users. Thanks to personas, I become more mindful by keeping the actual user at the heart of everything they do.