UX Personas

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.

Phase 1: Research

I began by reviewing existing marketing-focused personas. While somewhat helpful, they lacked depth around user pain points and a strong digital perspective—both critical for UX. 



To dig deeper, I facilitated two workshops with the DEUX (Digital Enterprise User Experience) team to uncover their current views, needs, and expectations around UX personas.

Phase 2: Gathering data

Collaborated with CX (Customer Experience) and CI (Customer Intelligence), and User Analytics teams to gather existing research for the UX personas.

After viewing the materials, 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
• Narrowed it to six key content areas and their supporting sources, which became the core building blocks for our UX personas

Phase 3: Synthesizing the Data

With research complete, I moved into analysis—looking for patterns to inform meaningful user personas.

I began by reviewing six key user journeys: Shopping, Purchase, Bill Pay, Manage Policy, Setup, and Claims. 

Each was broken into distinct stages, and for each stage, I tracked four key factors: 

user goals, needs, pain points, and their digital capabilities (e.g., Retention app, Dotcom web/app, live chat, chatbot)

I also reviewed the following data sources

• NPS scores, journey maps, personas, segmentation
• Segmentation strategy and data insights
• UX Analytics data from  platform usage metrics
• JD PoIr (June 2024): Pain points, industry insights, service/shopping evaluations, and the top 3 digital KPIs

I used the company’s AI tool to identify 16 user segments across six key journey stages and surfaced 28 initial archetype categories, which I grouped by shared traits. By aligning common characteristics across journeys, I refined and consolidated 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.

At the end of Phase 3, five final personas were distilled from the nine proto-personas, with additional alignment from sources like the J.D. Power U.S. Insurance Digital Experience Study.

Sidebar: The Company’s Virtual Assistant

A Case Study in AI-PoIred Support

The Company’s internal AI chatbot, was built to assist employees by answering questions about company policies, and operations. It draws from a curated set of internal tools and data sources

I relied on the AI chatbot early in the archetype creation process to efficiently analyze and organize complex journey data.
It played a role in the early stages of this project by helping process large volumes of internal data. I leveraged its strengths (accurate internal data, pattern detection in large datasets, data summarizing) while being mindful of its limitations (all output needed refinement, limited data sources).

Phase 4: Feedback & Refinement

I gathered feedback from CX, CI, and DEUX team leads, focusing on how the personas would be used by the DEUX team.

In the second DEUX workshop, the UX team reviewed archetype bios, voted on photos, and finalized biographies, imagery, and designs.

In the third workshop, we explored how personas could support more personalized digital experiences.

Key Uses of Personas:

• Prioritizing features
• Justifying design decisions
• Shaping visual hierarchy
• Centering user needs over stakeholder opinions
• Accelerating stakeholder alignment
• Identifying secondary persona pain points
• Writing user stories
• Building tailored messaging, voice, and tone strategies