Kallidus personas
Company
Kallidus are a B2B SaaS provider in the HR and Learning & Development space, that aim to unleash the potential in people through the use of their recruitment, learning and performance software.
Product
Kallidus Perform is a performance engagement system, which is adopted by organisations to support a culture of feedback and continuous employee development through ongoing meaningful performance conversations.
Kallidus Perform
My role
UX lead across all product personas and UX designer for Perform personas
The team
Working alongside the other UX designers for their own product personas, as well as the UI designers.
Key responsibilities
- Workshop facilitation
- Stakeholder management
- Conduct end user research
- Research analysis and synthesis
- Company wide education
The challenge
With two new joiners on the UX design team, and with more to come, it seemed like a good opportunity to refresh our personas for the Kallidus products to help build an understanding and empathy for our users.
The project goals
Create a set of personas for each of the Kallidus products we were currently working on. We believed by doing this it would have the following benefits:
- Build empathy of our users
- Help us with decision making in our designs
- Provide rationale for certain design decisions to other cross functional team members
- Help the wider cross functional team members build empathy for our users
- Help the wider business build empathy for our users
Approach
Persona framework
We needed to be intentional about what the scope of these personas were, so that this could be clear to others, and for us to understand areas that these personas perhaps didn’t cover. Taking inspiration from the Nielsen Norman Group article Just-Right Personas we identified a framework of personas for the Kallidus suite:
- Suite broad personas
- Product narrow personas
- Project narrow personas
To begin with, we would focus on the product narrow personas, as these were what would help us achieve our goals and contain the actionable data we needed. The project narrow personas would be created on a project by project basis, and the suite broad personas would be created in the future as we move forward with our suite integration strategic initiatives.
Image taken from NNg article Just-Right Personas
Persona template
Before thinking about collecting data on our personas, we outlined a template that we wanted to populate for our personas. This was based on best practice research as well as what information we needed to capture that was Kallidus specific.
Internal stakeholder workshops
We wanted to ensure we were capturing insights from all around the business who interact with our customers on a day to day basis. We ran collaborative workshops with a set of cross-departmental representatives across sales, customer success, support and implementation. This helped us understand the possible different segments of our user base, allowing us to form a hypothesis of what our personas might be, and a starting point for conversations with end users.
End user research
The team used a variety of approaches to this, however since I had other projects ongoing that involved end user research and testing I decided to combine persona questions into the scripts for these at the beginning. It had the added benefit of easing into the session and have a nice opener conversation before going into the detail of the project work.
Synthesising our personas
Using the insights from both the internal stakeholder workshops and end user research, I collated the findings into our persona template. This was done consistently across the products by each UX designer, and where an overlap of personas was identified we kept the naming consistent.
Writing, visualising and communicating
Since the personas were to be used externally to the UX design team we wanted them to look appealing and in line with our Kallidus look and feel. We collaborated with the UI designers to help us evolve our basic template into a full colour landscape visual.
Between us we all agreed on how they were written (in the third person) and we agreed on the naming. We decided to use alliteration within the names to make them memorable.
The persona document was created in a way that allowed them to be easily pasted into presentations as well as printed out.
We launched our personas in one of our monthly company wide UX design ‘Show and Tells’, and also issued an internal press release to explain their purpose and how they’d been created.
Conclusion
The personas have proved a useful asset for the team with the naming being memorable and people referring to them throughout their future projects.