Lightning - End users are not the only personas of your product / service

A talk by Karine Cardona

“I can tell you exactly who our personas are”. That’s how the VP of a mobile SaaS CRM introduced the first workshop we had when launching UX work for them.

He described four customer profiles to me : the retailer, fond of cross apps notification campaigns, the marketing guy working for a pure player, who’s waiting for advanced segmentation features to animate his mobile app leading to the website, the journalist, using notifications to inform readers with breaking news and the CFO of one of these 3, who’s looking for beautiful ROI dashboards telling him how great he did choosing this mobile CRM solution…

This was a great start, I thought. But while I was taking notes, a little voice in my head reminded me: stay open minded and let’s see what comes from user research. Some weeks later, I was presenting personas to the team. Some of them were very close to VP’s profiles description. But there was an unexpected one. One who were not even an end user of the product, but who had a tremendous effect on the customer’s experience: the tech in charge of the SDK’s integration. As an “anonymous third part”, no one would care much about him. But still: he was the key to a great experience (or a very bad one, leading customers to doubt about the product itself).

I’ll present the user journey map of the service, and will point out how third part stakeholders can have a tremendous effect on the user experience and should always be taken in consideration.