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Role Profiles
Template
Research Project

 COMPLETED: EARLY SUMMER 2023 
Scope

Small (1 month)

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My Role

UX Design Lead

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Platform

Confluence

 

Tools

Jira, Confluence, Word, Excel

RoleProfile.png
Project Summary

This project started out as an attempt to document our many internal personas as we designed products for them and turned into creating a reusable template in Confluence that could be used and built upon for our product team, PMs and Designers alike.  

 

Objective

Deliver a "Role Profile" template that can be easily used by anyone from the product team to bring clarity to design and development decisions, and demonstrate how use of Role Profiles can help the team. 

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Results

The delivered template is currently being used by the design team and allowing us to give a voice to the user in every room they are not in. 

Project Info & Goals (Q2, 2023)

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1. Audit / Research

  • Personas vs Archetypes vs Profiles. Should we build personas by role or user type - there could be multiple user types within one role

  • What data should be included in our personas in order to make them useful to our team?

  • Question definition. What answers do we need in order to make our personas useful?

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2. Begin Important Conversations & Shadows

  • What work has been done already - what’s our starting point? - Collab with team

  • Common persona creation best practices (NNG/Field Guide to User Research, etc.), and Persona vs. Proto-personas.

  • Explore persona templates already available for efficiency and inspiration - don’t need to reinvent the wheel (figma, dribbble, behance, etc.)

  • What’s “the Why”?

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3. Build a Template for Use by Design Team

  • Iterate on persona template options

  • Understand that personas created are living documents that will evolve over time Get designer feedback on persona template and best place to house it.

  • Finalize the template for use by everyone - Source of truth

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Intended Audience

  • Designers (within a pillar, or across pillars), for reference when planning research or designing

  • Product Managers, for prioritizing and organizing features based around user groups

  • Engineers, for understanding the tools and tasks of different user groups

  • Leadership, for having a birds-eye view of different teams' tasks and motivations

  • Stakeholders & Product Experience VP, for help with storytelling about how our tech improves our whole service

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What is a Role Profile?

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The Role Profile is an in-house-created format for user documentation. They help designers, product managers, and devs all understand better where each role fits in the life of a load and create the best tools for them.


Role Profiles are:

  • Less qualitative and faster to create than a user persona or archetype, but are intended for similar use

  • Full of helpful info about various roles, what they work on, and who they work with

  • Useful for product managers, designers, developers, and leadership

  • Segmented by job title or team

  • Self-reported, and completable over the course of a single interview with 2-4 people

  • Faster to create than personas/archetypes

  • Not summaries summarize extensive observed, qualitative user research data

  • Not as qualitative or behavioral as personas/archetypes

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Role Profiles contain:

  • Responsibilities - What steps of the process each role is responsible for

  • Assists - What steps of the process each role helps with

  • Relationships - What other roles each role most often collaborates with or reports to

  • Pains & Constraints - pain points or limitations, either due to tech or policies/process

  • Incentives (financial or cultural, if applicable)

  • Tools (digital or analog, ranked roughly by usage) (e.g. NetSuite, Money card, customer’s TMS) Location(s)

  • Collaboration Format (city / remote vs. in-person)

What We're Building

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  • An easily scannable document summarizing a user base using on real data and observations

  • A document that represents the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics Hugely valuable in articulating the needs of groups of people

  • Meant to give you the vibe of the person so you can be in that mindset when designing and building products/features

  • Aids in understanding a group of people in “cliff-notes” style based on knowledge of real users

  • Built to act as ‘stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about strategy, functionality and design

Why Confluence?

  • Super easily Searchable even if you don’t know where to look

  • Templatized documentation-style format for easy building, editing and scan-ability

  • Time/Date stamped so we know what’s relevant or stale

  • Quicker to get to the persona you need rather than scrolling through a lot of others

  • Easily shareable within the organization

  • Easy to consume, understand, and use regardless of role or design background

An example of our Role Profile
Why Have Role Profiles at All? 

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  • They are an important tool in our toolbox to equip us to:

  • Streamline our research for each project

  • Communicate throughout the team and align across pillars

  • Identify the real, underlying need or root cause of a problem, so we’re better equipped to build the right thing Weigh competing goals and needs and prioritize them effectively so we can effectively build the thing right

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What's the value for us and the business?

  • User Profiles give us a lot of detail about users needs and goals while promoting empathy for the humans using our software

  • They help us focus on creating useful products that help us meet our users needs

  • They help us document complex user research data in a format that’s more memorable and relatable and really easy to refer to over time to guide the many decisions we make about the design of our products

  • The process of creating personas allows us to internalize the data and themes we discover

Learning from the Past 

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​Why Personas Fail

  • Personas are created, but not used

  • Lack of buy-in from stakeholders who are skeptical of the validity of generalized themes

  • Personas are created in a silo and imposed on people

  • People didn’t know what personas were or why they were useful

  • They become outdated over time

  • Inaccurate expectations on how the personas will influence work

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Role Profiles vs. User Personas 

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Profiles for Enterprise Users

Role Profiles are better for enterprise users because they:

  • Describe a group of individuals who perform the same function

  • Often, though not always, conform to job titles in an organization

  • An individual’s knowledge, skills, and behavior are bounded (at least at a high level) by requirements of a role

  • More of a “top-down” construct: you can easily create a set of provisional roles by understanding how an organization allocates employee responsibilities​

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Personas for External Users

Traditional personas better for external customers because they:

  • Typically represent a set of fictionalized, archetypal users

  • Are ideally suited to characterizing consumers (or B-to-B purchasers) with the goal of meeting their needs and wants

  • Are more of a “bottom-up” construct based on attitudes, preferences, and behavioral characteristics. These are customarily defined as an outcome of research and may be marketed-oriented or design-oriented.

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Using Our Role Profiles

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Living Documents

Designed to Evolve... Stable and Trustworthy while Open to Updates

  • The stability of personas over time is critical to their ability to be remembered and internalized

  • Create them to be updated but only update in response to changes in the business landscape or in user base. 

  • Unnecessary updates can be counterproductive to the organizational adoption of personas Outdated/stale personas don’t get used, and unused personas get discarded

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Leadership

  • Strategy, prioritization, product experience storytelling, a “gut-check” on if we should work on certain projects

  • Can be used as a “leveling experience” when viewing applications from other user’s perspectives, a “portfolio” view for managers

  • Can be used to set expectations for different levels of a role including key targets, metrics and skillset evolution

PMs

  • Align the team on who our users are and highlight key behaviors, goals, attitudes, and pain points

  • Make sure we’re building the right things for the right people, and navigate conflicting goals

  • Guide conversations with stakeholders, keeps everyone on the same page especially when there are different ideas about what we’re building

  • Write effective and detailed user stories

Designers

  • Connect across the pillars to make usable and effective designs across user groups

  • Can help give us “clout” to our design decisions

  • Can be leveraged to influence design through guided brainstorming and scenario-mapping workshops.

Engineers

  • Empathy - understanding who we’re building for

  • Start each project with a “lay of the land” - like an org map for each role

  • Can help with backend integration, who’s using which tool and for what

  • Can be used for roles and permissions within ArriveNow

Stakeholders

  • Empathy for the user, considering their day-to-day experience when balancing the needs of the business

  • Understanding how decisions affect each user group and their goals

End Users

  • Gives users a voice when they aren’t in the room

  • Gives a breakdown of their tasks, tools, and processes as well as specific goals and motivations

  • Helps guide decisions about strategy, functionality and design

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