Field Notes · category

UX Research & Measurement

Customer research, personas and measurement practices that help teams make decisions grounded in evidence.

July 27, 2021

Leveraging Personas to Make Better Business Decisions

Research-based personas can connect customer needs with everyday business and product decisions, but many teams leave them unused. This article examines why technical priorities, business goals and delivery pressure can crowd out understanding of real users. It distinguishes assumption-based proto personas from validated research findings and describes the kinds of information that can make a customer story useful. Practical examples include linking personas to user stories, displaying them in shared spaces and creating trading cards. The goal is a recurring customer perspective in decisions, not a decorative deliverable.

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February 13, 2020

What is Service Design: Part 1 - Personas

Personas begin a three-part service-design approach that connects customer understanding, journey maps and service blueprints. This article explains how specific representations of customer groups can help teams make decisions grounded in needs and goals rather than organizational assumptions alone. Their value comes from research and from continued use in everyday conversations. Personas should reflect what the organization currently knows, remain open to revision and help people across the business consider the customer perspective. A persona that becomes an unchanging document on a shelf cannot serve that purpose.

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