UX: Create Business Personas Extremely Quickly
How to do B2B user research–without much user research
Business users are busy by definition, and that means they are notoriously hard to pin down for user research. This is a hack that I use to create rapid personas for business users that can be validated later.
Purists may disagree with this approach. But the point is, this approach is lean, avoids all the leg work involved in collecting qualitative data from user interviews and synthesising it.
- If you want to do this the traditional way, I have written
A Guide to Recruiting Users for B2B Research
This is my hack…
Job descriptions are ready-made personas
That’s it…
If you need persona for a Finance Manager, just go Google some job descriptions and job adverts for that role. Here’s some I found in two minutes:
Also go find some people’s resumes and credentials on Linkedin that match the role you are interested in.
Personas are for creating a quick understanding of users
A persona is simply there to give you empathy and understanding, so this technique will give you about 80% of the knowledge you will need in just a few hours of analysis. If you are very worried about accuracy, they can be validated later through interviews and surveys.
Steps for dummies
- Harvest job ads for your customer type
- Use the Just Read extension to remove formatting
- Save pages as PDFs into an /inputs folder
- Copy and paste any useful parts into an /outputs document
- Fix grammar, transforming sentences into user stories, goals, roles, duties, habits, etc
- Place into an A4 persona document
1 hour and you’re done. Two weeks saved recruiting business users for primary research.
Here is an example of how this looks, these personas took me just an afternoon of desk-based research and synthesis.
I use a folder structure developed by GDS:
/Inputs
Containing raw data dumps
/Outputs
A series of usable persona documents
Good is good enough!
These are accurate for my market because they have been created using quite a broad sample of data. They get me up to speed and provide the basis of my personas.
I will be looking to validate these personas through the user research I will be doing in the future and adding to them. Also, in B2B research I will typically meet customers rather than users. This means I can have a conversation with them and understand what they do.
These are not perfect, but they gets me moving very quickly, which is whole point of a lean approach.
Use them, don’t design them!
The personas can be used to make better assumptions about what the user will want or need. Through this, I could create a product concept, this can then be taken to a user interview or customer meeting to be validated with them.
Normally it would be hard to do designs without having a persona first or an understanding of their jobs to be done, this approach gets you on the first step of the ladder quickest.
If you spend hours making your persona look pretty, you have really missed the point of personas. Make them, use them. Design products not personas.
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I am an Experience Director from London now working in Glasgow.
