Spokeo provides its customers the ability to search for people online. The search site was in the process of finding new revenue streams and that became an opportunity to better understand who our users were. One of the research exercises we undertook was to create personas.
People Search
Spokeo
The challenge
Our executive team wanted to find new ways to sell our services to customers. They had an idea of what tiers of service they might provide (ex. subscription vs. per search) but not who would fit into those tiers or what their particular needs were. It was a little bit like putting the cart before the horse. The company never conducted formal research before and this was an opportunity to check our understanding of our users.
Our process
I led the team to try two different techniques based on budgetary factors and the fact that our executives were on the fence in regards to what user research would produce.
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Conduct observations with local users in the Southern California region.
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Conduct diary studies with remote users.
We worked with our customer service team to pull the records of recent calls and compiled a list of issues and ratings for our services. Based on these we were able to curate a list of participants for our studies.
Once the recordings and diary study responses were broken down, we enlisted employees from different parts of the company to participate in our affinity diagramming exercises. The categories that surfaced included the types of users, features or ideas they wanted, and themes such as monitoring (ex. I want to be alerted of changes in my neighbor's information) and safety (ex. who is calling my child's phone).
Identifying types of users
Building personas
We took our categories and matched them against demographics and psychographics to build a usable range of personas. In order to provide focus we consciously narrowed them down to 3 types:
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Safe Mom Susan — parents who are looking out for their children.
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Curious Carl — the most common use case of finding old friends or family.
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Professional Paula — uses people search as part of her business.
It was important for us to define our users and to build empathy for them. This would drive us to build products and services around their needs.
Learnings and results
Over the years the company had gained a certain amount of understanding about their users and it had definitely brought them success. However, it was a one-size-fits-all approach that most likely wouldn't scale to reach the company's new goals.
It was very rewarding to drive the creation of the personas from start to finish, but its adoption was another story. Even though the stakeholders recognized the importance of the different user types, it was challenging for them to back out of their current development path. However, I believe my fellow designers and I were able to provide a path towards user-centered design in the future.
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