PERSONAS AND JOURNEY
Understanding the customer
A common understanding supercharges productivity and collaboration
The Problem
Colleagues at citizenM hotels had a sense of their customer, but each had their own, based on their own slice of data. There was no common understanding. Over time the company had accumulated a proliferation of different personas and journeys, some part of abandoned efforts at a holistic picture and others created for specific projects. None provided a complete picture of the citizenM customer experience.
The Solution
A new canonical set of personas and a journey would be created with broad involvement of stakeholders across the organization. The new artifacts would be available to all teams as an aid to discussion and problem solving — a common, fact-based portrait of the customer experience.
Project at a glance
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Worked in partnership with the Director of Personalization
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Led meetings with stakeholder teams across the organization for input
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Collaboration with one other UX designer on artifact creation
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The project unfolded over 2 months, most of that time devoted to workshops, with about 2 weeks of more intensive creation work
Deep Dive
My view of personas and journeys is that the process of making them is more important than the final product. The process hits home with teams, aligns people, and engages participants more deeply, whereas the artifacts presented to someone after the fact don't have the same impact. Of course, the artifact has its uses as well, to externalize and memorialize the work. But for this project, we had the opportunity to involve most of the product teams who would use the personas and journey, as well as some teams who worked behind the scenes to support the customer experience.
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To get off to a strong start, it is always helpful to bootstrap an initial version with institutional knowledge — I am always surprised by how far I can get with that invaluable resource, which I make sure to verify — and citizenM did have plenty of journeys, sketches of journeys, and personas. Although none could be used wholesale, but they included plenty of information and ideas that were useful.
I mined what material I could, in the process saving a good amount time I would have had to spend doing discovery work, and I supplemented that with additional source material from existing recent research efforts, many of which I was involved in myself. I was well along the way to having the information I needed.
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Another question for journeys of this general sort is how much detail to include. In our case, citizenM needed something not too specialized, but rather broadly useful. I viewed it as a resource that could be used to bring new colleagues up to speed or for teams to use as a starting point in developing more detailed scenarios, to save them reinventing the wheel.
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To involve the product and support teams, we held seven separate workshop sessions, designing each session to focus on the parts of the journey the team had experience with. The meat of each session was a co-creation segment to get feedback on what we had already and to fill out any missing details.
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After some final iterations, I added images and gave it a more polished visual presentation. The finished artifact lived on a virtual whiteboard that was easy to access and consume. I finished the project with a company-wide demo.
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The final set of personas
The Outcome
The personas and journey had a profound impact on the internal working methods of the company. With a common reference point that was articulated visually, teams could align more easily, reducing misunderstandings and churn. With more information about the customer and the journey, teams could produce more relevant work.
Contact me if you are looking for more detail. I can provide it privately.