Challenge: Create user personas to represent the user types that use Vista Higher Learning online platform.

Background: Internal teams were siloed in communications and strategies regarding the online platform. We needed a consistent set of personas to work with and use for each market. The goal of the personas was to achieve consistency across departments and projects, eliminate irrelevant factors and focus on the defined needs of users to boost the workflow and give us a strategic path to follow, and better understand and identify our product market to make the most of the opportunities coming our way.

Process: I needed to get inside the minds of our users and understand their pain points, goals, frustrations, needs, behavioral patterns, and more. We had years of research in the form of user interviews, surveys, support tickets, and platform usage analytics. I reviewed internal interviews conducted with key stakeholders such as department heads and sales team leads who interface with our users on a regular basis. Putting all of this information together, I was able to develop the personas for both the Higher Ed and K12 markets, resulting in 16 total personas.

Implementation: The personas were shared with all teams as an interactive Figma prototype. We also shared and embedded personas into each Confluence document for each new project or initiative kick off to align the team on who our audience was.