A Case Study in Organizational Adoption of User Personas: Assessing Perceptions, Awareness, and Hesitation to Adopt

In a prior study, our team created research-based personas through an iterative, mixed-methods approach; however, as aB2BSaaS (business-to-business, software as a service) company, we faced unique challenges not only when generating those personas but evangelizing them throughout our organization. In examining the existing literature on persona building, we notice a distinct gap in reflecting on the organizational buy-in of these personas after their development. Much of the research in this area emphasizes the "how" of persona building, without exploring their ultimate impact, utility, and effectiveness in an actual organization. Therefore, the current study will explore the aftermath of persona generation, assessing adoption within our organization. To this end, we implemented a survey to assess employee perceptions of our user personas a year after their development, both within and outside of the product team. Measures within the survey assessed persona perceptions [10], awareness, and perceived utility. Additional open ended questions asked employees about any hesitations they have regarding our user personas that might lead them to not adopt them, opportunities for educating the broader organization on the existence of and utility of these personas, and how employees are using personas to influence decisions and communicate today. Analysis of these open ended questions helped define future directions for our personas, and additional education to facilitate organizational adoption of personas and effective communication about our users.