Personas for PTC
Optimized PTC’s persona template and persona repository to promote inclusive, customer-first design.
Role
UX Researcher
Team
Product Designer, Product Manager
Methods
Discovery research, co-creation, usability testing, secondary research
Summary
PTC provides smart manufacturing software platforms that enable customers to harness the power of Industry 4.0, including Product Lifecycle Management, Cloud Computing, Virtual Reality, and CAD modeling.
Project purpose: Given the limited size of PTC’s UX Research team, this project aimed to help product teams access user insights without a designated UX Researcher.
Outcome: Our persona portal received increased website traffic after I implemented a research-backed persona development and distribution system.
Discovery Research
Secondary research
Goal: Identify biases in our persona template
Method: I researched persona design Best Practices to identify biasing factors in our existing template.
Needfinding
Goal: Interview target users to align the persona template with their needs
Method: Eight 1:1 interviews with employees from PTC’s Product Teams to learn if/how personas were involved in their design process. This helped determine the content categories included in the new template
Shortcomings of prior personas
Template design
People pushed back on replacing realistic images with avatar icons. Although icons are less biasing than real images, icons were perceived to dehumanize the persona. To humanize the personas, I provided access to interview notes reminding users that real people were consulted in creating the document.
System design
Democratizing Personas
A storyboard helped communicate the new persona management approach.
According to the discovery interviews, personas were overlooked in the design process due to a lack of trust and value in the content.
To promote persona adoption and add an opportunity to empathize with customers, I facilitated bi-weekly customer interviews open to all PTC employees.
Employees were given access to a collaborative whiteboard where they could review the personas in development. They could also post comments regarding a persona, and access the schedule for future validation interviews.
Storyboard of proposed persona system
Personas in development
Update & share
With the new persona process in place, I resumed promoting our persona repository website.
A key takeaway from user interviews was that users struggled to find specific personas in the extensive repository. To improve the findability of personas, I co-created a new taxonomy system.
The new system yielded a significant increase in traffic on the persona repository.
Persona repository website traffic
We observed increased persona portal traffic (left) and time spent on the site (right). This suggests users could now find and review content rather than briefly search and leave the site empty-handed.
Reflection
This initiative demonstrated that systemic improvements can be achieved with small, incremental wins.
Personas are low-stakes opportunities to introduce user perspectives into the design process.
After this initiative, my manager and I developed a plan for a “research fair” where designers and PMs could participate in research sessions to strengthen their understanding of end-users.