Persona Research
The research highlights inconsistencies in persona management at Bentley Systems, emphasizing the need for a unified persona template and centralized repository, and outlines a four-stage program to improve persona usage through better collaboration and standardized templates among various teams.
Overview
✍️ My Role
UX Researcher
👥 Key Stakeholders
Design and Research Operation, Digital Experience Operation, User Experience, Product Management, Product Marketing, Education, User Success.
💼 Company
The Problem
Currently different teams within the organisation use varied workflows and tools for persona management. This siloed approach leads to inconsistency and inefficiency, ultimately hindering our understanding of users.
Hypothesis
Siloed documentation - there is a general lack of collaboration and low visibility caused by siloed work and inconsistency in cross functional collaboration.
Template requirement - each team emphasises different persona attributes based on their responsibilities.
Solutions
Persona research - a staged research programme aiming to help get deeper understanding gasp and areas of improvement in the current persona templates, and give recommendation of the persona hosting tools through qualitative research, quantitive data, and competitive analysis.
The programme is divided into 4 stages over a period of 8 weeks:
My process - to track research progress, we utilised a 30/60/90 plan, organising tasks, interviews, and outcomes in a Kanban format.
Outcome and Key Results
Set the foundation for how we will utilise personas moving forward at an organisational level.
Create coherence across the entire organisation for persona information hosting, managing, and empathising with our users.
Recommend suitable tools for future persona hosting.
Fieldwork
Goal
Review persona usage pattern across the organisation.
Methods
Qualitative research: conduct user interview with different user groups N=21
Quantitive data gathering: conduct internal survey N=36
Team's current challenges and needs
User Experience
UX
Challenge: Lack of confidence in current personas due to lack of validation.
Need: Regularly update personas through a robust validation process.
Digital Experience
DX
Challenge: Insufficient access to persona templates set by product teams.
Need: Access to a centralised persona repository.
Product Management
PM
Product Industry Marketing
PIM
Challenge: Inconsistent persona templates for customer messaging.
Need: Standardised templates and improved resource accessibility.
Which tools do they use? (diagram: makes tools anormones)
On average, 6 tools are used by the product team for persona-related work, highlighting the need for a more coherent approach.
What do our colleagues say?
“Some of the personas were validated, some were not. It’s hard to trusted outdated persona information.”
UX Researcher
”We want to understand how we are bringing benefit to a particular persona in the features that we develop in our products.”
Product Manager
“There is this inconsistency that people don't really know where which information lies.”
Marketing Manager
“…how we can use that skills and insights of others and create something that fulfil a lot of purpose not only for us, but for other.
Content Manager
“We're solving problem. We are not building persona.”
UX Desginer
“We are building personas everywhere!”
Web Designer
What are the common painpoints?
From the interview insights, I created the affinity map below to summarise common painpoints and area of improvements across different departments.
Findings summary
The persona library should be the single source of truth.
There is a strong need for centralised and standardised persona information.
Ensure transparency and visibility across the organisation with controlled admin capabilities.
Create coherence for persona information hosting will strongly help us empathise with our users.
There is a need for customisable persona attributes to fit different persona requirements by each team.
There are multiple persona templates created by different teams.
UX teams find the current persona template too generic and lacking domain-specific details,
DX teams find the current persona template overly detailed and specific.
Persona, scenario, and workflow are associated together for our product team.
Around a quarter of our colleagues think scenario describing a problematic user case and workflows are associated.
User journey needs to include both high-level and detailed technical workflows.
Scenarios needs to include the problem statement to describe what the user is currently struggling to do.
Competitive Analysis
Goal
Evaluate a list of persona hosting tools based on the criteria set up after the fieldwork.
Methods
Qualitative research: conduct user interview with product manager across different product line. N=9
Weighted score model
Field research
Based on prior research and business evaluations by the management and operations team, we identified 5 potential tools to conduct the analysis and evaluation. We requested demo and had a 2-week pilot with a selection of teams to test the functionalities.
Weighted score model
I created the following weighted scoring model to rate and visualise each tool’s pros and cons effectively. The procedures were:
Set up the weight values for each of the 8 criteria based on their rankings in the survey.
Score each tool on a scale of 1 to 5 based on the field research and user testing.
Multiply each score by its corresponding weight and calculated the total weighted score for each tool.
Call to action
The research has identified a few strong candidates for tools that are suitable and aligned with our needs. The next phase involves:
The executive and operations teams conducting a further business evaluation of the final tool.
Once a decision is finalised, the chosen tool will be implemented across the entire organisation.
After implementation, the tool's performance will be reviewed, and feedback will be gathered for any necessary updates.
Reflection
My Contribution
Use both qualitative and quantitive research methods to validate. hypothesis on the need for single persona repository and template.
Narrow down tool selection to a few strong candidates for further evaluation.
Use research data to inform strategic and business decisions.
Challenges and Takeaways
Cross-functional team collaboration and presentation
Throughout the research study, I worked with 50+ colleagues globally, spanning various departments and roles, from junior designers to the CTO. I learned to tailor my interview questions to suit different audiences. By the end of the study, I also needed to distill my research outcomes into an easy-to-consume presentation format to effectively communicate key findings to various stakeholders.
Feedbacks
“Great summary of tool selection… The key is to have one tool for both!”
“Brilliant work. So useful! So well executed. What a star!”
“This is really inspiring and will help us a lot!”
“Summaries that you put together have been so incredibly helpful for us to be able to make a decision on personas, or at least pivot some of our predisposed thinking. ”
© 2025 by Lynn Qian