Personas for Reviews.org
Content Strategy Intern at Clearlink

Existing Personas

The content strategists for Reviews.org had done some initial research into the users of the website and created four user personas for the website. First is the Comparer who visits the website to compare different services or products. The second persona is the Improver. This user is looking to upgrade their current set-up or keep up with trends. The third persona is the Learner, who visits the website to learn more about different products or services. The last persona is the Reviewer who visits the website looking to share information with other shoppers or complain about products/services.

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Clarifying the Problem

Reviews.org was looking to finalize their personas. The team had the personas named, but had not filled in any information about them yet. The content strategist for the website had collected some user feedback about their thoughts and feelings but had not analyzed the data. My task was to parse through the data and create themes to turn into the persona's motivations, frustrations, behaviors, and traits.

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Affinity Mapping

​I utilized Miro to create multiple affinity maps for each category. For each section, I started off by putting all the responses onto different notes, then I started grouping together notes that I thought were related to each other. After grouping these notes, I assigned them each a theme name with a different colored note. If two themes were related, I grouped them together under a larger note and named that new larger theme. 

 

This method allowed me to work quickly and efficiently, finding themes for each section of the four personas of Reviews.org. This organization method also allows for others to easily see how each note is related. 

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Road Blocks

The biggest roadblock was naming the themes. These theme labels had to be clear and concise to fit the style of Clearlink's other websites' personas. For example, the prompt for a persona's goals and motivations is "they want to...." This means my theme names had to continue and fit into this sentence format to make it complete. 

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Another roadblock was choosing which themes were most prevalent to be put in the final personas. Sometimes, there were more themes present than could fit into the 3-5 item limit in each section of a user persona for Clearlink. I overcame this roadblock by choosing the themes that had the most notes under them and were most closely aligned with the prompt.

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Final Product

I was able to develop the goals/motivations, frustrations/pain points, behaviors, and traits of each of the four personas for Reviews.org through affinity mapping on Miro. This project helped the content strategists on Reviews.org to finalize their personas which in turn helps the writers figure out how to write their content and allows the designers to decide how to create each page. Below are the maps and recommendations I made for each of the four personas.