PX?

Customer Experience and User Experience as concepts have been around for a long time. References to "internal customers" have also been around for a couple of decades. I would like to suggest a shift in thinking, however, to something we have recently been calling "Persona Experience" or PX.

Except in forward-thinking companies and in software design, experience has been ignored, used as a buzzword, or relegated to simply thinking about how a primary user type will interact with a piece of software. By expanding to Persona Experience, organizations will have better employee engagement, partner relationships, customer success - all of which ultimately result in more success in accomplishing their mission.

Why Personas?

As design thinking has grown as a trend, more of us are becoming familiar with the idea of a persona. Simply put, each persona is a representative type of person interacting with something else - a piece of software or hardware, a process, or even other people. Personas could be customers, employees, or external partners. But beyond that, there could be multiple customer personas, employee personas or partner personas.

By focusing on, and even just using the term Persona, we emerge from single-purpose thinking to beginning to engage in systems thinking.

What Does Persona Experience Thinking Look Like?

Using a fictional social media company, "SoftSoft", we can create an example of how this works.

SoftSoft decides that its customers should have a news feed. Since SoftSoft's developers already think in terms of the user, they are already looking at one persona - the typical customer. How will that customer see what is most beneficial? How will that customer add to their news feed?

Their next persona could be leadership - how will company leaders and managers see information about how their typical customers use SoftSoft's platform?

Then, partners. In this case, possibly advertisers. How will partners contribute ads, place them best, measure their success? How will they pay for their ads?

SoftSoft also has employees. Some are developers, some HR, some finance, and so on. How do their processes connect together, and what systems do they use? How easy or difficult is it for each to do their part? How much friction do they see, or what visibility do they have into their own performance?

As we can see, focusing on Persona Experience quickly blows up from a simple view to an overview of an entire ecosystem of interconnected parts.

Barriers to Persona Experience Thinking

The irony, though, is that organizations of any size already have that tangled ecosystem - whether they're in media or manufacturing. But by not paying attention to each persona or the interconnection between them, silos are reinforced and Personas slip through the cracks.

There are a few reasons organizations, and the people in them, will have challenges with Persona Experience. The first is simply awareness. Everyone starts at a company with a specific role and expectations, and it's all they can do to just get up to speed in their area. Then, they've developed habits of focusing just on that area.

Second would be incentives. Between direct incentives, such as bonuses based on specific KPIs, and indirect incentives, like impressing a manager, it is often not in employees' best interest to think about other Personas outside those incentives.

Also, consider enterprise architecture and executive support. Shifting to Persona Experience can sometimes result in investment, which requires leadership to write a check, or requires connections between people or functions which haven't historically been made. In some cases, executives set a culture that doesn't allow for this type of thought and design.

Last, it's hard. Beyond the changes of increasing awareness, realigning incentives, and adapting the organization to allow such thinking, the process of considering the experience of all involved personas means having to step back and look at things from a different perspective, change designs to work for multiple personas, and work with an increasing degree of complexity in mind.

The Good News

Reviewing the barriers may make you wonder if it's even worth it. But the good news is that shifting to Persona Experience thinking doesn't require a big bang transformation. Some baby steps to get started:

• Project or product leaders can add "Personas Affected" to project charter or user story templates - this will prompt thinking beyond the target stakeholders
• Organization leaders can review incentives and organizational structure to see where these are creating barriers to Persona Experience thinking, and evaluate possible modifications to start removing the barriers
• Executive leadership can begin changing the culture by bringing a focus on all Personas into their discussions at all levels of the organization

Every organization is different, and each has different barriers and opportunities. Comment below or message me if you'd like to talk about how this applies to your organization.