How do you adapt and update your user personas and user journeys as your users and context change?

The first step to keeping your people and user journeys relevant is to review them regularly. Make sure they always match the real behavior of your users, using methods such as surveys, interviews, analysis and testing. Involving your users and participating parties in this process guarantees personas and journeys faithful to reality.

Design Thinking is all about being flexible and resilient to changes. Having a constant conversation and feedback with the users are crucial. Bringing the users together through the Designing journey is a great leverage. Keeping the users close will be a great strategy.

While working on a defense project, our team constructed personas to represent various military roles. Over time, technological advancements changed how operations were conducted. To ensure our designs remained relevant, we revisited these personas annually. In one review, we found that advancements in drone tech had significantly altered an operator's daily tasks. Regular reviews, combined with updated data, ensured we caught such pivotal shifts in our user's roles, keeping our solutions effective and timely.

It is important to ensure that the project aligns with the needs and behaviors of the users, which can change over time. To do this efficiently, follow these three key steps: 1. Gather Fresh Insights: Collect new data by conducting surveys, interviews, analyzing analytics, and other methods. Pay attention to any changes in demographics, preferences, behaviors, goals, and pain points of the users. 2. Analyze User Feedback: Review feedback from customer support, social media, user forums, and any other sources where users might share their experiences and opinions. 3. Monitor Market Trends: Stay informed about industry trends, technological advancements, and competitive movements that could influence user expectations and behaviors.

regularly reviewing user personas and user journeys is essential to keeping them aligned with the real behavior of your users. Involving users and relevant stakeholders in the process ensures that the personas and journeys accurately reflect the evolving needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience. Here's a more detailed breakdown of the steps involved in this approach: -Regular Reviews -Data Collection Methods -Involving Users and Stakeholders -Data Analysis -Validation -Iterative Refinement -Communication and Documentation

In the second step, analyze data and feedback to spot patterns, trends, gaps, opportunities and challenges affecting users and journeys. Also consider external factors such as the market, competition, regulations. Prioritize changes based on urgency, importance, feasibility, and alignment with your goals to guide updating user personas and journeys.

Setting up automated surveys at regular intervals with dashboards that track user behaviour and attitudes also help stakeholders stay at par with changes in the users life, product context and usage.

Analysing data is often tricky and can lead to false positives or false negatives, so it's always recommended to test your findings and hypothesis through user interviews and confirm the findings as well as the context. Once the findings are confirmed one must quickly make the intended changes to fix/enhance the personas.

Updating your user personas and journeys is all about staying tuned to the evolving landscape. Start by deeply analyzing the data and feedback you've collected. Look for emerging patterns, trends, and gaps that tell you how your users' needs are changing. Don't overlook external factors either—things like market shifts, competitive moves, and regulatory changes can dramatically influence your users' context. Once you've identified these changes, it’s crucial to prioritize them. Focus on what’s urgent, impacts your users most, and aligns with your strategic goals. This way, you ensure your design efforts are not just reactive, but strategically adaptive.

Identifying and prioritizing changes in your user personas and journeys ensures your strategies remain relevant and effective amidst evolving contexts and user needs. How have you analyzed data and feedback to prioritize changes that align with your goals and address the most pressing user needs and opportunities?

In the third step, update and communicate your personas and user journeys based on the identified changes. Make sure they are clear, consistent and precise. Communicate updates to your team and stakeholders, explaining the rationale and implications. Document updates with sources of data and comments, organizing them in an accessible way.

We update and optimize user personas and user journeys requires ongoing communication with team and stakeholders. We update user journeys by identifying pain points and optimizing touchpoints based on feedback- ie regular observations, interviews and feedback sessions. We then usually communicate the findings back to stakeholders regularly usually with standup huddles or meetings- via single source of truth of customer journey or persona map.

If you treat your user personas and journey maps as single source of truth, you got to use it to align your teams and new hires. This is especially relevant for new hires across functions, be it sales, marketing, product, etc.

Some of your stakeholders should be the very people your user personas are built upon. Include them as integral parts of your team and the updating process becomes organic and fluid. Inclusion is key.

Throughout the Design work, there are high possibilities of changing the personas as things becomes clearer. If we are co creating with the stake holders, we might be able to communicate with them instantly. If they are not, we need to update them and show them the reason behind the updating of customer personas. Change is really not something people welcome easily. As long as they could see the reason and the progress, it has high buy-in chances.

The fourth step involves continually testing and iterating your personas and user journeys. Validate them with your users, measure their effectiveness, and use them to guide your design decisions. Evaluate how they meet user needs and goals. Stay attentive to developments in your context, ready to update personas and journeys again if necessary.

When you speak with your users or other stakeholders that you turned into personas, you got to remember to validate the information within and also add new information based on what you discovered. It's about getting organized in your persona and user journey documentation so that it becomes the single source of truth.

With updates in personas one must also update the designs and test it out again with actual users before pushing it into development. The reason being a high fidelity prototype testing is often cheaper both in terms of cost and effort than actual development.

When we have updated the User persona, It's time for us to probably work on the field research again. Testing and iterating is not the 4th step as written in this article. It's working on the field research and normally it would give us an update on the journey map. It will then lead us to Analysis and synthesis.

Reflect and evolve! After updating your personas, take a moment to see what's clicking and what's not. Share the wins and lessons with your team, invite their thoughts, and together, celebrate the progress. It's all about growing and fine-tuning: > Dive into how you gathered info for your personas and spot what worked best. > Have a chat with your team and stakeholders for fresh perspectives. > Celebrate the big wins and useful insights these personas brought to your projects. > Look for spots where the personas missed the mark. > Keep your personas fresh with regular updates, pulling in new insights and feedback to keep them spot-on.

This is strongly related to iterations and feedback and fits in a mindset or culture of continuous improvement. Once you start implementing improvements, it is important to continuously seek feedback and review data and metrics to see what works well and what can still be improved.

Learn fast and learn forward! Go into the process expecting to fail sometimes, but know that those failures are lessons that you must put to good use within future iterations.

It's important for us to collaborate and communicate the learnings to the whole team. Bring them into the discussion and tell them, why there is an update on the persona. Share what you have learnt and bring the team to discuss over the matter. Probably there are more learnings and insights from a certain updates.

In the sixth step, adapt and update your personas and user journeys as an ongoing practice. Think of them as living documents, not fixed artifacts. Cultivate a curious, empathetic and experimental mindset, remaining open to new data, feedback and ideas. See change as an opportunity to learn, grow and innovate.

Get x-functional teams to be involved in updating the personas and the journeys. There should only be 1 single source of truth for personas and user journey. Eg. sales got their own ICP, but if their ICP is the same with personas, they should be combined and accessible for both. This is institutional information that has to be circulated.

They should be more than living documents, your stakeholders should include living people! If your solution/product/service remains 'on the market' you should continually engage with the users and be willing to amend according to their experiences.

Adapting to the new persona, at times is exhausting. As we could have gone to a longer journey then to find out that the Persona need to be refined. But that's the mindset we need to have. An ever volatile and changing landscape in the Design world. We need to be able to adapt and bring back the creative mind.

In general, none of the design thinking artifacts are static. I call them the living, breathing tools that evolve and change constantly. As design thinking is not a linear problem-solving approach, designers should keep an eye on the forecasts of change, such as trends, behaviours, anthropological, social and cultural dynamics, etc.

Continuously gather data through surveys and interviews to better understand the evolving user needs, behaviors, and preferences. Regularly review and revise user personas based on new insights. Update demographic information, goals, pain points, and behaviors to accurately reflect your target audience. Monitor market trends and technological advancements that may impact user behavior and preferences. Conduct iterations frequently. Incorporate feedback from stakeholders to validate and refine personas and journeys. Test updated personas and journeys through usability testing to ensure they accurately represent user needs and expectations. Document changes made and share your learnings and insights with stakeholders.

Trying other modern techniques such as real time analytics, machine learning or on going feedback loops through surveys. This will provide persona insights to better understand the dynamic needs of the user journey as environments and socio economic changes occur.

Cultural Shifts: Monitor cultural and societal changes that could impact user behaviors or values. Technology Evolution: Stay updated on advancements in technology that affect how users interact with your product or service. Competitor Movements: Keep an eye on competitors’ offerings and innovations. If users gravitate towards competitors due to new features or experiences, update your personas and journeys to better align with their evolving expectations. Global Events: Account for the impact of global events, such as pandemics or climate changes, which can alter user behaviors and preferences. Update journeys to reflect how users adapt to such events and how their interaction patterns shift.

It's common to experience, user persona changes when designing products for the mass or a huge organization. This is a huge challenge for people who are too structured in nature. We need to be flexible and adaptive towards changes that happens along the way. Enjoy the beauty of these explorative way of working. The end result will be magnificent.