leader
Unifying Personas →
Ethnography, Creativity; Innovation
Innovation requires thinking differently. We needed to make personas sticky (memorable) and create a buzz. Our action figures stirred controversy, got people talking, and got engineers and senior executives on our side.
Eagle-eye Edward Action Figure Presenting in a Meeting
1
problem
- Every product team across a 35,000 person company defined personas differently.
- Stock photography, which is what teams used for persona pictures, was forgettable.
2
solution
- We considered photos, cartoons and action figures. Decided on action figures. __
- Many people said personas must be represented by a human photo to create empathy. We found no research that proved we cannot empathize with a non-human character (action figure).
- We found empathy to be the same, but found recollection to be significantly higher.
- Produced a set of personas for different customer segments that were used for many years.
3
impact
- Won an award for innovation by the CMO.
- Posters of these personas showed up outside the office of the CMO and several Senior VPs, with a sign “get to know your users!”
- My team was invited to participate in cross-business-unit tiger teams to solve challenges.
