Beyond personas: A comprehensive approach to understanding users

Awesome. Thank you all so much for joining me. This is our session, Beyond Personas, a comprehensive approach to understanding your users. My name is Collyn Cooper. I've been at ServiceNow three years. I'm a user experience researcher, and I mainly support our HR service delivery products. And I'm really delighted that you have joined. I know there's a lot going on, so there's a lot of places you could be. So thanks for being with me. This is a traditional safe harbor slide. You've probably seen a lot of them at this point. It's an FYI. Please, we might have forward looking statements, don't make decisions based on those. We have one person who's having trouble hearing right back there. Thank you, Freddy. All right, so today we're gonna talk about the main problem with how we typically understand our users, why traditional ways of understanding users like persona building often fall short. And lastly, how understanding archetypes and mapping a user ecosystem can really help us build better solutions. So today you're gonna walk away. I like to give this up front so you know what you're getting into. You're gonna walk away with a really powerful mapping technique that's gonna allow you to visualize your entire user ecosystem and really help your organization identify gaps in how you're reaching users and identify opportunities for innovation. We have a QR code. Your name was Kelly? Kelly's already scanned it, thank you. And here all we've got, we've got all the materials you need. So we've got this deck, we've got a key takeaway slide. I don't know if you're like me and when you go to conferences, you have to share things back with your team. We have a slide already made for that, if you wanna share that back with your team. And then we also have a workshop. So if you're really interested in what you hear today, you can join me at 2:30. It's tomorrow on level four, it's Marcello 4505. I hear it's a maze to get there, but at 2:30 we'll be diving deeper in in more of a workshop style so people get to meet each other and really do a bunch of different exercises to get familiar with the framework. So join me there tomorrow. All right, you might be thinking, actually, it was great, I got to meet a lot of you before the presentation, which I wasn't expecting. Some of you are in UX, some of you are not. But if you're wondering, "Is this really for me?" I wanna assure you it is because if you've ever created a solution that fell short of meeting the needs of your user base, we've got some ideas here. Or if you've known that the solutions you are building aren't really having the impact that you think that they could, but you've struggled with an approach to take to how to uncover some of those unmet needs, we're gonna dive into that. And then lastly, if you wished you had deeper insights into your user base and how people are really interacting with your products out in the wild, we're gonna, yeah, go through some frameworks and some ideas to help you better reach those unmet needs. All right, so I wanna start with a story that might be relatable. Do I have any parents in the room? I got some parents, I got some parents. So would you imagine for the sake of this story that you are a parent, and for Christmas, your child receives a really, really, really annoying toy, maybe from someone like me who doesn't have children. It's like the cool aunt, the cool uncle. And your child loves this toy because it has flashing lights, it makes really loud noises. And your kid loves it, but it's much less desirable to everyone else. So let's say siblings who are trying to sleep in the same room, let's say other diners when you're out to dinner, other passengers on an airplane when your kid is playing with it on an airplane. And though these people are not direct users of the toy, they still have a personal experience of the toy. And so they are different kinds of users. And so today we're gonna explore what is that ecosystem of users around a product? And something that Sesame Street got really, really well is they really understood this. They understood that there's a broader range of expectations, of user expectations. And so oftentimes parents are the ones making decisions of what their child is gonna watch. So Sesame Street includes jokes like this one as well as celebrity appearances and musicians, because they knew that, okay, parents are really the indirect user of this TV program, right? So what's the real problem that we're trying to address today? There are really critical limitations with how we think about users. And so I'm gonna introduce us to a new way of thinking about everyone who uses our solutions, which I know sounds really ambitious, but as organizations navigate an increasingly complex user ecosystem, having a really nuanced understanding of user behaviors and needs is really critical for business success. So we're gonna explore a framework that offers an approach to identifying and supporting those underserved users in your ecosystem. And we're gonna call this term, "User ecosystem thinking." And so by categorizing users into these distinct archetypes, this strategy, again, you're gonna get tired of me hearing me say it, but it really opens up opportunities to create impactful experiences by identifying like, who is in our ecosystem that we haven't been designing for, that our solutions don't meet the needs of? Before we dive deeper into the framework, though, I wanna do some definition setting. So, what is a user? We're gonna define a user as anyone who has a personal experience of using a product or a service. And so oftentimes we usually only think of users as direct users. So someone who is really engaging with a solution in a way that is direct and active. So in the child and toy situation, we often think only of the user as the child, right? When in reality, users are anyone that has that personal experience. So in that example, people in the airplane, people at dinner, older siblings are also users that we haven't considered. And what happens is we often design solutions that fall short of meeting everyone in that base by not considering all of those users. So what is a user ecosystem? A user ecosystem is a network of interconnected users that really recognizes the relationships that people can have with a product or with a service. And so we often think of users in silos and don't really consider those different relationships. And then last but not least, what is user-centered design? And I'm gonna show you what happens in this video when you design without the user in mind. So it's unclear how much research went into this baby bowl, despite the fantastic suction action that you see, it is pretty useless. Boom. (chuckles) So user-centered design, it's an approach to problem solving that prioritizes understanding and addressing real needs and real preferences to create solutions that actually work. So this is a pretty shameless plug for UX research and design led organizations. A recent study for McKinsey found that over a 10 year period, design-led companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 219%. So to reduce UX research and user-centered design really to its simplest, simplest form, we ensure that we're building solutions for real problems, or for real people that solve real problems. And one tool that a lot of us have in our tool belts to build empathy with end users are personas. And you probably, most of you are pretty familiar with what a persona is. So a fictional character created to represent a typical user. They often include personal characteristics, emotions, values, and goals. So let me get a show of hands. Who's either created personas in here or has been asked to use a predefined persona? Almost everyone, okay. And can I get a another show of hands for who has felt like personas have really helped them, like, uncover opportunities for innovation and really, like build better solutions for folks? Awesome, good. And that's great because I am not trying at all to say that we shouldn't build personas. Personas are fantastic. It's really one of the most powerful tools that we have to really build empathy with end users. And today what we wanna do is go one step further. And so that's the framework that we're gonna be introducing. So many of you're familiar with personas, and I wanna introduce you to the concept of an archetype. And so archetypes are defined only by their objective relationship to a solution. Another way to think about it is how people engage with a solution. So they're free of personal characteristics, free of emotion, agnostic of users' intentions and goals, and they're also evidence-based. So archetypes help us identify these different users in our ecosystem. So I've got the direct user highlighted in green here, because again, that's how we usually think of our users, but there's a lot more ways that people engage with our solutions. So the 15 archetypes in this framework was developed by Michael Youngblood and Benjamin Chesluk through many, many years of research. If you're really interested in this framework, a lot of this talk comes from their book, "Rethinking Users" And so yeah, if you wanna dive deeper, that's a great resource. And this framework is gonna offer, again, what's the name of this talk, right? A comprehensive approach to identifying and supporting these different folks. So questions that you wanna ask as you're identifying these different archetypes is, "Do we have these archetypes in our ecosystem? Was our solution designed with these archetypes in mind? And then should it be?" Because maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe you identify different users, different archetypes and say, "No, we're making a decision not to consider their needs and not to build product in that way." But hopefully in mapping the ecosystem, you can identify ways that you might wanna innovate your solution. So I wanna start with a real world example. And before we dive in, I think it's important to clarify, there's a ton of content that the ecosystem and the user archetypes. It's a lot, so the goal is not to leave here with a perfect understanding of what each archetype is and what the definition is. The goal is really a tool to spark questions, a tool to spark thoughts, conversations. And that's why I'm excited about the workshop tomorrow 'cause we'll get to dive deeper into some of the different nuances, but ultimately using this as a thought experiment. So looking at the workforce of a typical ServiceNow customer, let's say in the manufacturing sector through this 15 archetype framework, it really allows us to identify different challenges that people might face. And then how that can and should really inform the solutions that we're building. So if we take corporate communications as an example, the channels that are typically utilized for corporate comms, they typically serve desk-based workers. And so desk-less workers are quite underserved. So in the context of corporate comms, manufacturing workers, and this example can be understood, is the direct user. So that's how we normally think about users. But more interestingly, these direct users can be categorized as dependent users. So users that really rely on supervisors, managers, administrators to get important information that's shared by the company. So sometimes these employees, they share kiosks to access corporate comms, or they might share a computer that belongs primarily to a manager or a supervisor. So we wanna ask ourselves then, "How can our solution best serve a dependent user? Do they need mobile access, do they need offline access? How can we ensure the platform is accessible for multiple devices simultaneously?" And that users can pick up where they left off if they need to switch devices in the middle of something that they're trying to accomplish. So administrative users can be seen as governing users because they really control the engagement that a desk-less worker has. So how can we best serve governing users? Should we provide them with a really high degree of administrative control? So desk-less workers can't access content that they're not meant to see. Maybe we need to design a way for them to create customizable content. So it's really tailoring content to a specific role, to a specific team, for a specific shift, even. And so this really ensures that dependent users receive relevant information to them, but then also protects the privacy of that governing user, of that administrator. So you can also think of desk-less workers as serial users because they're engaging in a solution in a series one after the other. So if we think about, all right, how can we best serve serial users? We might wanna ensure really secure log off. Like, how can we really send messages to say, to make it really clear like, "You've logged off, your privacy is important to us, you can trust this system." This is just a small sample of four of the archetypes to kinda get us into like okay, how do we use this? How is this helpful to us? But I don't wanna leave until we touch on a few more. And so I'm gonna use a really simple example for this. So imagine a shared commercial kitchen, and different cooks, they're gonna be renting space in this kitchen one alongside the other. So I think we've all got the direct user pretty down pat at this point. The direct user is that cook. They're the person renting the space and they're creating some sort of food vision. They're bringing their food vision to life. An indirect user is someone that engages the solution personally, but indirectly through someone else's use. So this could be a business partner, a family member, someone that's coming to give feedback on food or taste test. And then a dependent user. We had that in the desk-less worker example. So engages a solution is enabled by someone else. This could be an intern or a trainee, someone who's using the kitchen but under supervision. A parallel user engages a solution along with others who are doing the same thing at the same time. So this could be all the different cooks who are sharing that space, whereas a complimentary user, they're engaging the solution alongside someone, but in different ways. So maybe someone is getting feedback on packaging design or someone's working on some marketing materials and then other folks are using the space to cook. Surrogate users engage the solution as a stand in for someone else. So this could be someone has to temporarily leave and someone comes and takes over what they were doing. It could even be, "Hey, my hands are full. Can you open the oven for me?" So just yeah, acknowledging and roping other people in to get help. Conglomerate users engage the solution intimately and consciously as an extension of themselves. We see this a lot kind of in the health tech world, but for the example of this, it could be someone who's using hands-free voice command. So setting temperatures and oven yeah, timers, things like that. So like, yeah, utilizing it as an extension of themselves. And then the last slide for now for this example is intermediary users. They enable others to engage the solution through their own engagement. So if you think about an in-house staff person, they are prepping the kitchen in the mornings, they're resetting the kitchen in the evenings, making sure that everyone who uses the space has a positive experience. Ambient users are my favorite users for some reason, I don't know why. They engage the solution through their effect, or through its effect on their immediate environment. So in this example, you could think of pedestrians who are having to walk around trucks that are being unloaded and loaded at the kitchen. Also folks that are walking by and smelling different smells that are coming from the kitchen. So yeah, just if you think about the environment and how a solution affects people's environments. And then the last one for today is oblique users. And those are folks that engage the solution through the byproducts of others. If you think about how you discard things, maybe broken kitchen equipment or maybe someone else is gonna go and and look through that. And so how can we think about systems that even include the discarding of that thing and the byproduct. So there's more, we don't have time to get into them, so please join us for the workshop tomorrow. When we think about the ServiceNow ecosystem though, I wanted to just quickly go over just some different ideas. I think this is different depending on what products you're using, or yeah, what your specific role is. But direct users can be understood as employees and customers, governing users, ServiceNow admins, dependent users, maybe that's a new employee being trained in a specialized domain. A serial user could be someone who relies on shared workstations or kiosks like from the And then surrogate users could be a staff member filling in for a coworker, maybe someone who's out on leave. Generative users, employees could be personalizing their own interface. Or my personal favorite, I know someone that built Wordle on the ServiceNow platform. So that's a great example of generative use. So I know this is a ton of content. In summary, user ecosystem thinking categorizes our users into 15 different archetypes. It offers a really comprehensive approach to identifying and supporting underserved users in your ecosystem. And we believe that it can really help your organization by expanding how you think about different personas and different users. Can really help you gain deeper insights into your user base, and most importantly, identify different opportunities to create impactful experiences and drive business growth. Thank y'all so much, I appreciate it. (audience members applauding)