User personas inform the foundation of a new website, mobile app, and service delivery model
When we started a new project to overhaul the entire way Student Job Search (SJS) delivers its work we knew we needed to take a human centered approach.
In order to help shape the product direction and identify who we were actually building for, we put together a set of user personas for both Students and Employers.
What we learned
More user types than expected
We were surprised to discover that there were actually quite a number of distinct types of users across the Student and Employer groups. Given how diverse the student and business communities are it shouldn't have come as a surprise, but it was an important learning and showed the value that the initial research had.
Different user needs really highlighted how much the current one size fits all system struggled
For Employers and Students, there were certain users who needed a lot of support and others that were super self sufficient. A lot of this came down to the type of jobs they listed or applied for. This in turn directed us to focus on really understanding the different user journeys in order to create experiences that were fit for purpose.
Research methods
Myself and another designer worked to assemble an understanding of who the users were through a range of research methods
Recorded phone conversations
The call centre automatically recorded all calls so we had a wealth of examples of the breadth and context of jobs and applications that Students and Employers made. This was great context but didn't allow us to gather any information that wasn't incidentally provided.
After call surveys
We initiated an autoprompt to invite all Students and Employers who called in to SJS to fill out a short survey after the contact centre staff had helped them with their enquiry (calls were a big part of the service delivery). This gave us the ability to ask targeted questions to a large number of users.
Individual interviews
on the back of the calls we also asked if people were keen to have one one one conversations. A surprising number were keen and we were able to go deep on understanding unique users needs as well as follow up on the trains of thought that just naturally come up in conversation
Focus groups
A final method was to get a number of users together for focus groups. This was dual purpose research and HCD opportunity and really highlighted the pain points that Students and Employers had. We were wary of relying too heavily on focus groups as we were only able to run them in Wellington, indexing too heavily on Wellington based users could preclude important learnings from further across the motu