American Family Insurance
UX Personas
Project Summary
To create UX personas for the DEUK (Digital Enterprise User Experience team to replace the marketing personas they had been using.
Some images are intentionally blurred to comply with legal and confidentiality requirements related to my work with an insurance company.
The Goal
Create research-based UX personas that guide UX designers, researchers, and content specialists toward more informed experience decisions for current and future customers.
Timeline
8
months
Collaboration
CX
CI
Data Analyst
UX Designers (20)
UX Researchers (3)
UX Strategist (1)
UX Content (4)
UX Managers (2)
Tools
Figma
Miro
Teams
Focus Groups
Jira
Confluence
My Role
Project Lead
UX Strategy Lead
UX Designer
Current State Assessment
I facilitated a workshop with the business stakeholders and the UX, CX, and CI Teams to uncover current views, needs, expectations, and beliefs regarding UX personas to get a feel for what the teams might want and expect from the UX personas.
Why this exercise was important
This workshop aligned UX, CX, and CI teams on persona expectations, revealed how each team actually works and makes decisions, surfaced cross-functional needs, and highlighted widespread confusion between marketing and UX personas, leading to a dedicated presentation clarifying their differences.
What are UX Personas?
Detailed representations of user types, based on behaviors, needs, and motivations.
- Marketing personas support how you sell.
- UX personas shape what you design and build.
Teaching Stakeholders The Difference Between Marketing And UX Personas
Marketing personas focus on demographic and psychographic details to
guide marketing strategies.
- Determining if a sales concept will achieve desired results with a target audience.
- Iterating and adjusting a company-wide strategy or concept to optimize its effectiveness.
Sample marketing persona
Phase 1 - Assessing Current State
Reviewing Existing Personas
I began by reviewing existing personas. All personas created in the past had been marketing-focused. While somewhat helpful, they lacked depth around user pain points and a strong digital perspective—both critical for satisfying digital UX. .
Images are blurred to meet legal and confidentiality requirements.
Phase 2 - Gathering Data
From the CI (Customer Insights) Team
Data Gathered
- Life stages
- Experience levels
- Confidence levels
- Risk tolerance
- Expectations set by other products or industries
- Call center and support feedback summaries
- segmentation
Yields
- Goals
- Motivations
- Attitudes
- Real quotes
- Real scenarios
From the CX (Customer Experience) Team
Data Gathered
- Customer journey maps
- User wants and needs
- Struggles and pain points
- Reasons for most popular service interactions
- When users want to seek help
- Interaction preference types
- Where users want help
- Reasons for staying/leaving flows and services
- NPS scores
- Marketing personas
Yields
- Frustrations
- Emotions and mindsets during tasks
- Preferred usage channels
- Help and support expectations
- Reassurance needs
- Trust needs
The manage policy journey is organized into flow-oriented stages, with color highlights indicating user actions, requirements, pain points, and digital feedback channels.
From the Analytics Team
Data Gathered
- Task frequency and duration
- Platform usage metrics
- Feature usage patterns
- Success and failure rates
- Emerging behaviors
- Primary and secondary behaviors
- Usage intensity
Yields
- Primary vs. secondary behaviors
- Usage intensity and habits
- Evidence-based priorities
- Validation that the personas represents real user groups
JD Power Studies
Research team feedback from user tests.
independent customer satisfaction surveys and User Tests
Information from research teams' user tests and J.D. Power Insurance Digital Experience studies and reports were also used to gather data about
- Industry insights
- Service/shopping evaluations
- The top 3 digital KPIs
- Our digital customer pain points
- Areas of the experience where opinions about the UX had risen or fallen in rank in the past year.
User tests by research returned several real user quotes.
Phase 3 - Synthesizing Data
CX, CI, And Data Analytics Assets
After collaborating with CX, CI and Data Analytics teams and assessing their assets,
- I Identified which UX-specific content needs aren’t covered by current CX or marketing personas
- Grouped the content by research source and ranked it by priority—essential, important, and nice to have, and
- Narrowed it to six key content areas and their supporting sources, which became the core building blocks for our UX personas
For example, I reviewed our six key user journeys, shopping, purchase, bill pay, manage policy, setup, and claims.
Each journey was broken down by sub-journeys, and their stages. I analyzed user goals, needs, pain points, and digital capabilities for each sub-journey step.
Our user journeys and their sub-journeys
MoSCoW Prioritization
I began to arrange the data into the categories Must have, Nice to have, Optional and Out of scope for each of our UX team members and our business stakeholders.
AI-PaIred Support
The company’s AI chatbot was trained on data from Blooper Insurance and its operating companies and draws from a curated set of internal tools and sources, including company policies, operations, and customer insights.
I used the chatbot early in the archetype creation process to support research synthesis by analyzing and organizing complex journey data. It enabled efficient processing of large volumes of internal information, with particular value in pattern detection, accuracy, and summarization. All outputs were reviewed, refined, and validated as part of the overall research methodology, with awareness of the tool’s limited data scope.
ChatGPT and Perplexity AI were also used for supplemental research.
The Personas Begin Taking Shape
With the help of internal and commercial AI tools, an early pattern of 28 initial archetype categories surfaced across 16 user segments.
By aligning common characteristics across journeys, I refined these into nine distinct, behavior-based proto-personas. I then created sample personas for each of the 16 segments, mapping them to the proto-personas to ensure consistency and relevance.
The data was re-compiled by shared traits until there were five final personas distilled from the nine proto-personas, with additional alignment from sources like the J.D. Power U.S. Insurance Digital Experience Study.
Phase 4 - Feedback And Refinement
Second Workshop
In the first part of the workshop, the UX team was given a list of potential data groupings or sections to be incorporated into each personas, such as a biography, list of digital preferences, needs, etc. They were given the task of sketching some potential templates for the archetypes.
Why this exercise was important
This activity helped the team align on the structure and content needed to make the personas actionable and consistent.
Sample template sketches
In the second half of the workshop, using a short set of demographic and behavioral details, participants individually searched for images that matched their mental model of each persona. The images were then gathered on a shared whiteboard, where the team aligned through discussion and voting on the image that best represented the persona.
Why this exercise was important
This exercise helped align individual mental models and create a shared, humanized understanding of each persona.
Mental model images of each persona gathered.
The UX Personas
Phase 5 - Socialize And Iterate
Third workshop
UX designers, strategists, content specialists, researchers and business stakeholders reviewed the finalized personas and discussed how they would use them in their day-to-day work, including feature prioritization, design justification, visual hierarchy, stakeholder alignment, user stories, and messaging strategy.
Why this workshop was important
This exercise reinforced the personas as a relevant and essential business-critical tool for aligning cross-functional teams while providing positive outcomes for business stakeholders as well as the UX Team.
Business Stakeholder Outcomes
- Improved prioritization
- Accelerating alignment between business stakeholders
- Strengthening business stakeholder alignment
- Accelerated alignment across business and UX teams
- Reducing decision friction across UX disciplines
- Business strategies can be developed based on real user needs
UX Outcomes
- Better decision making
- Faster decision-making
- Clearer prioritization
- Design, content, and research can serve real user needs
- Reducing decision friction across UX disciplines
Immediate results
The teams began applying the personas to their work and reported these results
- A new clarity of direction when prioritizing features
- Less friction when justifying design decisions to business stakeholders
- Helped when shaping visual hierarchy
- Helped the design team center user needs over stakeholder opinions
- Accelerated stakeholder alignment (teams were on the same page)
- Able to Identify secondary persona pain points
- More clarity when writing user stories
- More tailored messaging, voice, and tone strategies
Final Outcomes and Impacts
I distilled insights into five relevant, actionable personas through a collaborative, multi-phase process that combined research, AI analysis, workshops, and cross-functional team feedback.
The final personas emphasize user behaviors, goals, and pain points across many digital journeys rather than just marketing demographics, and provide the teams with clear guidance to prioritize features, justify design choices, and create more personalized, user-centered experiences.