Personas + Archetypes
Validating personas and exploring archetype use in Design for IBM Z
Design Research | Personas + Archetypes | Operationalization
Role: Design Researcher
Team: Research, Design Lead
Methods: Interviews, Secondary Research, Persona Development, Questions + Assumptions, Surveys, Archetype Development
My co-researcher and I saw room for improvement in the way that we implemented personas, so we set out to see if there was a better way to center the user experience in our work. After three months of interviews, surveys, and secondary research, we had established a new user framework, validated existing profiles with clients, and shared with our studio the importance of collaboration for client outcomes.
Many different personas represent a single role, or archetype. However, the personas we came across are not as detailed as they could be.
Many different teams use versions of Cloud personas. Mapping out the different stakeholders and the relationships between them allowed us to target the most impactful individuals and groups to interview about persona use in design.
Click image to enlarge.
Overview:
This project was a joint effort between myself and the other researcher on my team. We conducted interviews, read articles, analyzed trends, compared frameworks, and built our final report together. The project originated in our daily standup, where we often shared frustrations about the muddled use of personas on our teams. We saw that our work was becoming siloed from other researchers in our business unit, and that a lot of personas were becoming figureheads rather than the detailed representations of users they were meant to be. We initially set out to validate a few personas that we used regularly that we felt were drifting from reality, but through continuous pivoting, we ended up with a critical perspective of the design process and a few possible solutions to better understand clients and work together more effectively.
While research was the center of this project, it was also important to me to use this work to build the design and research community at IBM. I had conversations with countless designers and researchers about process, frustrations, and successes that led me to a greater appreciation of the community. Our end product not only is a framework for user centricity, but a framework for design researcher unity.
Objective
Most IBM teams use personas to follow congruence between offerings, introduce technical team members to user centricity, and create storylines around our work. The objective of my research in this project was to uncover whether we are using personas in the most effective way, and to evaluate the possibility of using archetypes or other trait-based frameworks. As a team, we also aimed to validate existing proto-personas (un- or minimally-researched personas) that are central to our work.
These objectives were meant to shine a light on other ways of engaging in user-centricity and help to maintain healthy churn and innovation in our design practice as a whole. Additionally, I hoped that this work would lay a foundation for a more connected and accurate understanding of the clients we work with.
Work:
This project began as a persona validation initiative, but as we continued to check in with one another and accumulated more knowledge, it quickly pivoted to a more expansive project on the operationalization of research and the importance of a unified research framework and experience across offerings. Over the course of three months, my co-researcher and I engaged in interviews, an examination of existing IBM resources, and secondary research on trends and frameworks of understanding users.
A few highlights:
Spoke to engineers, IT specialists, system administrators, and C-suite executives from American Express and Bradesco Bank
Validate existing personas, mapped client relationships
Interviewed IBM designers and design counterparts at OpenShift to see how they utilize personas and other frameworks
Examined existing IBM resources: Z Persona Directory, Security Persona Library, Cloud Data and AI Persona Directory, and archetypes in the IBM Design space
Read outside articles on the proper implementation of personas and archetypes, persona trends in Cloud computing, and the Cloud market share
Created outlines for potential archetypes for use in Z Hybrid Cloud Offerings and IBM Hybrid Cloud as a whole
Presented findings to IBM Studios Poughkeepsie + guests
An example of how the Archetype framework (roles + context + tasks) could be used to unify our ideas about Cloud Administrators. Individual personas could be created using project specific data.
Visualization of Personas vs. Archetypes used by the Security team at IBM
We looked at narrative archetypes to learn more about how the framework could be used in the design context.
Diagram of Business Units at IBM, all of which are now focused on Hybrid Cloud delivery.
Outcome:
At the end of all this work, a few things were clear:
Cloud, especially Hybrid Cloud, adds a layer of complexity to our users’ roles that often makes it difficult to pin them down with a single persona
Clients need user stories that are specific to their roles and use cases in order to understand how IBM can fit into their current ways of working
On the whole, IBMers currently use personas like archetypes, meaning they are broad and thematic rather than specific and targeted
This project taught us just as much about our own ways of working as it did our clients and their needs. While we don’t have clear metrics of an increase in client satisfaction or an uptick in archetype use, this project catalyzed a shift in perspective that will impact projects in Z Hybrid Cloud and beyond.
The next steps we will take with this work include creating a framework to help people build their own archetypes, use archetypes within our own team and evaluate their efficacy, and continue to socialize this idea to receive feedback from designers in Z Systems and IBM as a whole.
Last Thoughts:
This project was very different from other work I’ve done at IBM. It was largely self-directed, and my coworker and I had to rely on one another for resources and structure. Because we pivoted continually, our end result wasn’t as developed as I would have liked, but we couldn’t have reached the same conclusions and uncovered the same nuances had we targeted archetypes from the beginning. I hope to continue to make time for this work — self-reflection and criticism is really valuable to me as a designer and researcher, and I see this project as a way to bring those values to my greater community.
As a result of this project, I am comfortable:
Conducting open-ended and unstructured interviews
Analyzing market trends and engaging in extensive secondary research
Crafting objectives and research questions for generative studies with limited guidance