BlackBerry Personas

  • Project Type: Research
  • Company: Research In Motion [website]
  • Duration: 4 Months
  • Role: Project Coordinator

Results

Context

A need to develop personas representing RIM's diverse user groups was identified by the documentation team. At the same time, our User Experience Team was also beginning to create personas and we decided to combine our efforts. The documentation team wanted these personas to help inform design decisions they made for their documents structure, language and content. These personas would then also be used in the development processes across RIM by multiple parties including, product managers and developers. I was chosen for my knowledge in the area of qualitative research, personas and profiles. (Note that the words "personas" and "profiles" were used interchangeably in this project.)

Process

We began by defining our needs with the various documentation leads that represented all of RIM's different products. Each voiced their needs and expectations of the profiles and my role was to be a consultant: explaining potential capabilities as well as limitations of personas.

Old Draft Persona Template

A template was asked to be drawn up through various iterations and collaboration with stakeholders. The above picture is an earlier draft that we made. As many stakeholders was unsure whether the template would accommodate all the information they were looking for, we made a pilot persona. I introduced the use of cultural probes to gather data and we sent 6 probes to 6 participants recruited using a third party company.

Processing Cultural Probes Findings

We analyzed and extracted information from the findings that were sent back to us in various group sessions.

Persona Pilot

Using this preliminary data, we populated the draft persona template with the information. This gave stakeholders a clearer idea of the information that they would be getting and revisions were made according to their comments.

Persona Template

In the final template that I created, each section contained a short blurb of what information would populate it and a list of potential methods that can be used to gather the data. I also began a document outlining how to plan and run various activities that would gather data.

Persona Creation Process Diagram

It was important that the creation of personas would continue after I had finished my contract at RIM. I took the initiative in creating a profile creation process. I divided it into various phases, stating stakeholders and tasks for each phase. Each phase also had results that acted as the requirements and indicators of the completion of the phase. The model also indicated possible iterative steps and cycles illustrating the non-linear nature of the entire process.