Giving Personas a Life of Their Own

Giving Personas a life of their own

Michael MorganSenior Manager, User Experience Research

UXPA2013

@WalmartLabs

Kelly BraunSenior DirectorUser Insights & Analytics

Our challenge: Understand the Walmart.com customer

●Lots of data on Walmart stores– 100,000,000 people shop in a Walmart every week

●Fiscal 2013 Walmart had net sales of $446 B

●Fiscal 2014 Walmart.com projected at $9 B

●Most Walmart.com shoppers also shop in Walmart stores

Who is the Walmart.com shopper?

How do we design for her?

@WalmartLabs: User Insights & Analytics 2


History of Walmart.com


Who is not a typical Walmart.com shopper?


You are not the customer!


Image Source: http://www.avsinc.net/imgs/pictures/usgbc-medium-conference-room-large.jpg

Drinks CoffeeLoves Cats

Previous attempts


http://www.avsinc.net/portfolio/case-studies/sub-case-studies/usgbc.html

Personas

Vendors

Research Team

UX Design Team

Executive Stakeholders

Training Dept

Data

Buy In

Training Materials


Base Personas on Data

Personas

Research Team

UX Design Team


Training Dept

Data

Buy In

Training Materials


Provide a data rich view of online shoppers thatwill enable teams to make more

informed decisions about designing for Walmart.com.


Data, data, data

●Mined multiple sources for existing data– Store customer data from HQ Consumer Insights team.– Ethnographic research conducted to inform Mobile product

development.– “Customer Pain Point” data

• Site “health” benchmarking studies• OpinionLab data

●New research was conducted– Attitudes and Usage survey– Customer Interviews (field and remote)


Attitudes and Usage Survey

●2229 online shoppers.

●Blind study, data also gathered on various competitors.

●Multivariate, factor analysis.

●Cluster analysis produced 5 segments.

●Data collection and analysis done by:


Customer Interviews

●32 customer interviews conducted by BellaVia Research

● Interviews conducted nationwide:– NY, IL, AZ, OH, TX, NM, WY, UT, LA, GA, NC

●Blind study

●Half before Holiday / half during Holiday– Including Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Persona Creation

Videos

Cross Tabs

Segmentation

Transcripts

Charts

@WalmartLabs: User Insights & Analytics

Melding multiple sources of data into a cohesive story

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Organizing the data


6 Personas

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3 Primary Personas 3 Secondary Personas

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Persona Material Creation Process

Personas

Research Team

UX Design Team


Training Dept

Data

Buy In

Training Materials


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?Drinks CoffeeLoves Cats


Rough Sketches


Final Visual Summary Statement

Demographics

Hierarchy of Needs

Personal Quote

Summary of Attitudes and Behaviors


Delights and Disappointments

Channel and Phase of Shopping

Use Case

Final Visual


Persona Novellas


Buy In

Personas

Research Team

UX Design Team


Training Dept

Data

Buy In

Training Materials


Getting buy in along the way

●Within your organization

●External organizations

●Execs


Week of: May 14 May 30 June 4 June 11 June 18 June 25

Personas Final ContentPersonas Final Content

Apply visual designApply visual design

Final Persona ApprovalFinal Persona Approval

Build in the time as part of your plan!

What is important to each stakeholder?

●Within the User Experience organization– Budget and Researcher time.– High quality data and rigorous analysis.– High quality final deliverables.– Stories: easy to consume knowledge about our customers. – Reference tool that can be used in all phases of the product

development lifecycle.



●Within Product Development organization– How will Personas help us go faster during design and

development?



●Within Marketing and other Research organizations– No “turf” wars: Personas are NOT a marketing tool.– They want their opinions are heard. Chance to give feedback.– High quality data and rigorous analysis.– “Feels” right.



●Walmart.com President and Executive Council– Do these “feel” right?– Does the data support this?– Will we make the right decisions?

●Evidence of due diligence

●Support from other Execs


4 Steps

Personas

Vendors

Research Team

UX Design Team


Training Dept

Data

Buy In

Training Materials


Training Phase 1

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Training Phase 1

High Level Summary


Training

User Experience and Product Management Training

Tips• Introduction • Provide high level overview of main points• Group exercise


Training Phase 2

Deep dive

Tips

• Figure out your consumers

• Tailor the content to those people



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Company-wide Training

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“I happen to like them. Anything to humanize the blinking lights on our servers and numbers in our spreadsheets is good for creative marketing.” – VP of Marketing



Image Source: http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/02/28/switching-recruiting-technologies-3-ways-to-encourage-employee-buy-in/Image Source: http://content.arma.org/imm/July-August2012/garpseriesgettingbuyin.aspx; http://www.homemasterbuilders.com/images/commitment.jpg

Summary Statement

Demographics

Hierarchy of Needs

Personal Quote

Summary of Shopping Behaviors



Delights and Disappointments

Channel and Phase of Shopping

Specific Attitudes and Behaviors








Personas

Vendors

Research Team

UX Design Team


Training Dept

Data

Buy In

Training Materials


Questions


Technology

Giving Personas a Life of Their Own