How to build user portraits, 4 methods!

As a very common design tool, user portraits already have a very mature theory on the C-end, such as Alen Cooper’s “Seven-Step Persona Method”, Lene Nielsen’s “Ten-Step Persona Method”, etc. These are very professional methods for building user portraits, which are worthy of our reference and learning. Companies can create user portraits based on their business indicators, which can help us understand user needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.

However, there are far fewer articles about B2B user portraits than on the C-end. I believe that many people, like me before, have a vague and scattered understanding of B2B portraits and don’t know how to build it. This article is guided by Youzan designer @Meifang. Let me discuss with you my insights on B2B user portraits.

Table of contents:

1. What is a user profile?
2. What are the characteristics of B2B user portraits?
3. Why build B2B user personas?
4. How to build B2B user personas (how)
5. How to spread and use B2B user portraits

This article attempts to share with you the overall conceptual framework and construction method of B2B user portraits through a what-why-how structure and combined with my own work to do some practice.

Due to the confidentiality of our company's data, I cannot directly share the fine-grained and corresponding data with you. Therefore, during the sharing process, I will combine the content and data shared by the industry and other predecessors on the Internet as cases. If there are any deficiencies and errors, I hope you can criticize and correct me.

1. What is User Portrait

Before talking about B2B user portraits, I would like to first talk about the concept of user portraits. When reading some articles, I found that some authors confused the two concepts of user portraits. Many people may not have noticed that the term user portrait contains two different meanings: one is User Persona, and the other is Use Profile.

1. User Persona

User Persona is an overall abstraction of a user group. This concept originated from the field of interaction design and is a systematic method of studying users mentioned by Alan Cooper in his book About Face: The Essence of Interaction Design.

The book “Win ​​with Users” translates it as “persona”, and the industry currently uses the term “user portrait”. The meaning is the same as the expression. It is a virtual representative of the real user, and is a virtual user derived based on a deep understanding of real data.

• Research methods: quantitative + qualitative research, with more emphasis on qualitative research;
• Purpose of portraits: Used in products, interactions, and designs, portraits are an important tool for them to understand user goals and needs, communicate with the development team and related people, and avoid design pitfalls;
• Research direction: deeper and more detailed, we will dig deeper into the motivations, reasons, motives, desires, pain points and other attributes of the underlying users; in simple terms, Profil helps us understand what the product is designed for, and Persona helps us understand why the users of the product behave in this way.

2. User Profile

User Profile is a portrait of each individual, which is created after the product user base reaches a certain scale.

User attribute label extraction based on user behavior data or reported information is more commonly used by operations and data analysts. It is a collection of various variables that describe user data. In the era of big data, companies clean, cluster, and analyze massive amounts of data, abstract the data into labels, and then use these labels to concretize user images.

• Research methods: tend to be quantitative research and data analysis;
• Profile usage: Mainly used in operations and marketing. Personalized recommendations, advertising systems, event marketing, content recommendations, and interest preferences are all applications based on user profiles. For example, we often see many websites with different faces for different users, which is actually the result of refined operations of User Profiles.
• Research direction: Broader and more comprehensive, focusing more on studying people's basic attributes, social attributes and behavioral habits, and paying more attention to data analysis and mining of correlations. Help us understand why users behave this way.

The comparison of the two types of portraits is shown below:

Now that we have clarified the difference between the two portraits, let’s focus on the User Persona type of B2B user portrait (referred to as “user portrait” in subsequent articles).

As for User Profile, it is more suitable for products with a large user base. However, except for leading companies, it is difficult for B-side products to reach this level. It is undoubtedly more appropriate to use User Persona, which will not be discussed in this article.

2. B2B User Profile Features

Whether it is a B2B or B2C product, whether at the business level (such as focusing on key user types when resources are limited) or at the product level (better understanding what users want, determining the scope and priority of functions), the essence of establishing user portraits is to assist in some decision-making.

The difference is that the C-end is aimed at a large number of scattered individual users, and the main purpose of user profiling is to cluster users and better understand the characteristics and preferences of different types of users.

B-side products are aimed at enterprise-level users, meet the management or operational needs of enterprises, and focus on cost and efficiency. The purpose of profiling is to organize and explore the needs of users with similar tasks in different parts of the business in a more three-dimensional and rich way, which is often related to roles.

It determines several characteristics of B2B user portraits:

1. Affected by the enterprise life cycle

Ichak Adizes proposed the theory of corporate life cycle, which states that the development of an enterprise can be roughly divided into four stages: start-up, growth, maturity and decline.

Enterprises at different stages will have different organizational structures, focus, management methods, etc., different product demand emphases, and different user portrait directions and research methods.

1) Start-up phase: product project establishment stage

This stage often refers to when the company is just established. At this time, the product and corporate culture have not yet taken shape. It is in the customer accumulation stage and is more focused on traffic generation.

It is necessary to identify market segments, product models and functions through user portraits. Qualitative research is required at this stage to understand the target users and initially form user portraits to provide underlying support for demand. The granularity of user portraits at this stage can be coarser, aiming to help the team quickly reach a consensus on "who our users are".

2) Growth stage: product operation (data has been accumulated)

At this time, the product already has a demo or has been launched for iteration, and the product is in the stage of improvement and upgrading.

You can use the "data mining + quantitative screening + qualitative enrichment" method, combine the existing data of the project, use quantitative screening of users, conduct a large number of micro and specific user surveys, discover problems based on background and third-party platform monitoring, locate the key issues and analyze the causes, optimize product functions and operating models, and then understand specific behavioral details and attitudes through research interviews.

User portraits at this stage can be used to verify problems, improve or discover new opportunities.

3) Mature stage: the product is relatively stable

Customer resources are relatively stable and may have reached a certain scale. Internal management needs are increasing, market position is becoming stable, and daily work is mostly maintenance-oriented.

Moreover, the existing growth points have encountered bottlenecks, and user activity will inevitably and slowly decline. Even if you do more product optimization and spend money on operations, you cannot change the fate of the product's eventual decline. It is only a matter of time.

As enterprises are eager to find breakthroughs and new growth points, user portraits will be given a new mission: analyze "new growth points" based on user portraits, qualitatively explore the blue ocean, and then quantitatively verify them.

4) Decline: Product activity declines rapidly

Entering this stage means that the product has not been successfully transformed. There is actually not much point in creating user portraits at this time. If you must do it, in addition to increasing the return rate and exploring growth points, you can qualitatively understand the reasons and adjust the product.

2. Diversity of product user roles

Different from the single user of C-end products, the user portrait of B-end products does not correspond to an individual, but an organization or institution, and also covers different people in the organization.

The product is intended for users ranging from ordinary employees to corporate executives, covering sales, technology, administrative personnel, etc. Based on different work scenarios, the demand for the product may also be very different. Taking a CRM system as an example, a complex B-side product may involve users in the following four roles: decision makers, primary users, secondary users, and indirect users.

As shown in the following figure:

1) Decision makers

The person who makes the decision to purchase a product or service may be the head of a business line, or the company's chairman or CEO. They are often not the user of the product, and they use it infrequently or even not at all. They usually consider the overall interests of the company and are more concerned about whether the product can help the company's business, reduce costs or improve efficiency.

Their evaluation of the quality of a certain function is often contrary to the user's feelings, such as DingTalk's "DING". They are not too concerned about the usage process and experience, but more about the core value of the product and maximizing benefits.

Meeting the needs of decision makers is a prerequisite for making good B-end products, and is also the direction that must be clarified when creating user portraits. The reason why many products with poor user experience and ugly appearance can also have a place in the B-end market is because they meet the needs of enterprises.

In an ideal situation, the team conducts in-depth research on the target customer group and develops standardized products, which can impress most of the decision makers in the target customer group.

2) Main users

People who really use the product frequently are also the group that product/designers want to target when they want to improve the product experience. They may be more concerned about the specific use of the product, whether it is easy to use, whether it helps them complete their work more conveniently, and whether it improves their work efficiency.

The main users are the easiest to identify. Take the CRM system as an example. If sales do not enter customer data into the system on a daily basis, management will not be able to view the information they care about, such as order volume, progress, etc.

3) Secondary users

The frequency of product use is lower than that of the main users, and the functions used are relatively few, involving only a small number of operations in a certain intermediate process. For example, in the CRM system, human resources and finance may be involved in the approval of money or business trips. For them, the main requirement is to be able to quickly find their tasks and complete them.

4) Indirect users

For people who do not directly use the product but will be affected by it, it would be very considerate if the product and designers have the resources and energy to take into account their needs and experiences during the design process, such as auditors and government personnel, whose needs are not urgent and non-essential.

3. Job responsibilities determine user goals and usage scenarios

The usage scenarios of B-side users are closely related to the business model, and the products usually solve problems that occur when a certain type of role is working.

Therefore, it is different from the C-end user portrait. It starts from the user's perspective, pays attention to the user's personal scenarios, demands, pain points and emotions. The core is to meet the user's needs and pay attention to the user's age, gender, income, personality, habits, consumption patterns and other labels.

However, in B-side products, we put aside the label of users as individuals. We pay more attention to the role represented by the user, what his job responsibilities are, what tasks he needs to complete in the work scenario, what these tasks are for, and his job responsibilities determine the goals and scenarios for completing the tasks, what tools to use, whether he needs to cooperate with other roles, and other information.

Therefore, B2B portraits focus more on role classification, work/usage scenarios, user goals, operation links, role collaboration and other information. It is difficult to see content such as whether the person is married or how old the children are, which are not known how to apply to product design. In the user portrait of a C-end product, it is rare to see information such as what KPIs make him stressed.

Still taking the CRM system as an example, the goal of its main user - sales - is to use the system to input business opportunities, leads, etc., and then formulate customer communication and follow-up plans based on the data. The focus is on whether the system can enable him to perform his job responsibilities well, and it has nothing to do with his personal characteristics such as which city he is in, whether he is married or unmarried, etc.

4. Composed of customer portraits and role portraits

B2B products are aimed at corporate users and meet the operational needs of various companies in the industrial chain. At this time, the B2B portrait should have the dimension of industry and customer attributes; but the final buyers and users are all roles in the enterprise, which determines that the B2B portrait also has the dimension of role.

Therefore, the author believes that the B2B user portrait is a portrait jointly composed of the enterprise and multiple core roles. To establish a B2B portrait, information on both the customer (enterprise) portrait and the role portrait is required.

1) Customer Profile

Customer portrait refers to corporate users who use B-side products or services, and has industry characteristics, corporate characteristics and role characteristics.

Its goal is to facilitate sales, and it is mainly used to help sales/operations personnel quickly locate target companies, help them better understand what kind of people our customers are, and make their work more directed.

A typical customer profile would include:

• Basic information: external labels, such as industry, region, staff size, and revenue scale (annual turnover);
• Business model: the actual offline business process - depends on the industry, such as business model (how to make money), business model (how the business operates);
• Organizational structure: what are the organizations from top to bottom and their relationships with each other;
• Key roles: What positions/jobs are there in each organization, what roles are there in the decision-making chain, who are the valuable key roles, and the role's voice. The key decision makers of an enterprise vary with the size of the enterprise. Generally, the key decision makers of small and medium-sized enterprises are bosses, partners, etc. Large enterprises purchasing B-side software must go through internal processes, and the final reviewer is the boss, but the person who has the greatest influence on the decision is often the business manager.

2) Character portrait

Although B-end products are aimed at enterprises, they are ultimately used and executed by humans, and these executors (end users) are also the testers of the products. Before the company decides to purchase a product, the executive level has no say, but at the time of renewal, their say will begin to increase significantly.

Therefore, during our product design phase, we will pay more attention to the role portrait of the executive level. When we discuss products, needs, scenarios, and user experience, we often need to focus on this group of people.

A typical persona would include:

• Basic Information

Such as character name, photo, role/job type, platform preference, education level, office location, and frequency of use. The character name and photo are intended to provide a more immersive description of the individual's situation.

But it is worth noting that the situation here revolves more around career status, such as years of work, job responsibilities, ability dimensions, etc. The family situation that is common in the C-end, such as the number of children, etc., are not important at all.

User behavior drivers: user's work goals, work tasks and assessment indicators. B-side roles are usually corporate employees. For the sake of salary, there are generally assessment indicators that are completed in conjunction with tasks. Understanding the assessment indicators can help you know more clearly what content users are most concerned about during the design process.

• Usage scenarios

Working time, place and work content, usage scenarios are important but easily overlooked. In particular, it is important to understand the scenarios for using the product, the user's daily workflow, and the main functions used. It can be outlined with a true, common, and easy-to-understand story.

• Usage Expectations

The challenges and pain points faced in daily work, and the help expected.

There is no direct relationship between persona and customer persona. Because of their different goals, there will be different user segments: the goal of customer persona is to make sales and gain profits; persona persona is to solve problems and create value for users, and further create value for the company.

However, when portraying B2B user portraits, if you only consider the executors, without customer portraits as a guide and understanding the characteristics and behaviors of decision makers, your product functions or experience design may be seriously deviated or even go in the wrong direction.

3. Why build B2B user portraits?

1. The value of customer portraits

Products and services are just tools and media for companies to deliver value to customers. No matter what form the product takes, its essence is to solve customer problems.

If the product cannot meet the customer's business needs, it is basically of no value to the customer. The role of customer portrait runs through the entire product life cycle, and products/marketing/sales pay more attention to it. Its value is mainly reflected in three aspects:

1. For products: clarify who you serve, quickly understand customer needs and conditions, determine product function design, learn to identify user solutions and user demands in scenarios, and continuously iterate and adjust products;
2. For marketing/operational personnel: Establish a comprehensive understanding of customers and determine marketing content, marketing strategies and channel selection based on customer portraits to focus the product’s service targets;
3. For sales staff: help sales to screen customers, find effective customers, improve conversion rates, and determine business direction and sales strategy. Rationally configure the team and complete KPI.

The earlier the customer profile is established, the better, but be sure to control the depth and cost, because businesses at different stages have different focuses.

In the early stages of a startup, the product team can accumulate qualitative data by focusing on typical customers, thereby building customer portraits at a low cost. In the growth and mature stages, on the premise of having a large amount of customer data, the company can gradually transition to using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to form a clearer customer portrait.

2. The value of character portraits

There used to be a saying in the industry that when working on the B-side, usability is the first priority and user experience is not important. Therefore, except for some large-scale SaaS companies, designers are almost useless on the B-side and have become component porters and tool men.

Therefore, most companies do not pay attention to user experience during the period of land grabbing. Companies have customer portraits, but not necessarily role portraits. Those who still say that user experience is not important can read the public statement of Youzan CEO Bai Ya.

The picture comes from the Internet

In 2020, the epidemic brought traffic to enterprise-level SaaS. After the announcement of the postponement of resumption of work in February this year, the number of DingTalk searches increased several times. Both medium and large enterprises and small and micro enterprises have joined the ranks of remote work. Collaborative office SaaS has gained a large number of "trial customers", accelerating the process of market activation.

But next, traffic conversion and user retention will become the core focus in the post-epidemic era. In the post-epidemic era, it is increasingly important for companies to improve product user experience, understand the end users who use the products, and build role portraits. As a portrait that products and designers pay more attention to, role portraits have the following three values:

• Before design: help establish design goals, design strategies and guidelines;
• During design: resolve the problem of chaotic architecture, clarify the rationality and priority of required functions; resolve demand disputes and communication issues, and reach consensus with team members on service goals;
• Post-design: Solve usability testing problems to help us identify the right test users.

To sum up, role portrait is the foundation of the product, and customer portrait is the symbol of the product's extended vitality. The two complement each other.

4. How to build B2B user portraits

For this chapter, I will use an enterprise product that I am responsible for as an example to describe the process of creating a user portrait. In this project, we created user portraits through qualitative research. Of course, if necessary, you can also verify the obtained user portraits through quantitative research at a later stage.

The creation of user portraits can be divided into the following steps:

1. Step 1: Research preparation and data collection

B-side user research is a little different from C-side user research. The usage scenarios of enterprise users are based on business, with complex backgrounds, diverse roles, and special tools (such as the company's own backend system), which makes it impossible to simulate them in a usability laboratory. Therefore, we have to get close to users and understand them based on business scenarios.

The editor roughly summarized that B-side user research has the following three major pain points:

1. Difficulty in obtaining information: B-side products are mainly aimed at users’ work and business development. Generally, the use of products is mandatory and there is no room for “picky” choice, resulting in very little user feedback and high barriers to obtaining information. "In-depth interviews" are the most core and cost-effective way to obtain information. However, due to their lack of understanding of the purpose of the information and concerns about the leakage of commercial privacy and business experience, B-side users may be unwilling to cooperate with the survey or may not trust you.
2. Complex business: Lack of industry experience and difficulty in understanding the business will make the user research object feel that you are unprofessional, as if you are talking to a deaf person or a cow. Moreover, without understanding the business, designers will focus too much on the basic business during the interview process and fail to conduct a deeper interview. The information collected is not the real needs of users.
3. Different perspectives: Designers tend to lack framework thinking, and are unclear about the boundaries of each business module/function and the relationship between them. They cannot think from the perspective of users (decision makers, users), so they are led by the nose by users and believe whatever users say. There are very few parts that can resonate with users.

As the saying goes, "sharpening the knife does not delay the chopping of wood." In response to the above three pain points, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive desktop research at the beginning of the project to help us quickly establish a global understanding of the industry and understand the business. On the other hand, it also helps us communicate better with users.

1) Research content

1. Product positioning, profit points and target customers;
2. What are the current business goals and what problems do they mainly solve?
3. Overall business framework, core business processes and usage scenarios;
4. How different roles work together and the values ​​and goals of each role;
5. Understanding of professional terminology;
6. Key resources and capabilities to achieve business objectives.

2) Research approach

1. The company's official website, competitor's website, relevant industry reports, and industry conferences can help you gain an overall understanding of the industry, such as professional websites such as iResearch, Analysys, and CBDNData (membership is required to view some reports);
2. Search for relevant articles by searching keywords in search engines;
3. The quickest way is to ask the product manager/business side for relevant documents or ask them directly;
4. Sales/customer service/implementation consultants, etc. Generally, the products launched online will have customer feedback groups or collect and organize customer demand information in real time. Through them, you can roughly understand what problems the current products have;
5. If there are expert users in this field, you can humbly ask these expert users for advice, as they have a deeper understanding of the business.

2. Step 2: Determine the goals and dimensions of the portrait

There are 2 points to note here:

1. How to filter out target users?
2. What are the portrait dimensions?

The following will explain the above two points in turn:

1) How to screen target users?

Cooper pointed out that products should not be designed for more than three user portraits, as this will easily lead to demand conflicts. When there are multiple user portraits, the priority of the user portraits needs to be considered.

As mentioned earlier when talking about the characteristics of B2B portraits, since it is an enterprise product and only one business line in the product, the roles are also diverse, so there is one thing that you should pay special attention to when screening target users: you should identify key user portraits.

Taking our company's recruitment business as an example, in order to make it easier for everyone to determine at a macro level what kind of companies are our main target users, our approach is to define three KA customer portraits according to the type of company.

The product, market, and leaders of each group work together to prioritize user portraits. When determining the priority of user portraits, we can mainly consider the following aspects:

• Frequency of use
• Market size
• Potential for earnings
• Competitive advantages/strategies, etc.

Then look for key role portraits, namely the decision makers and main users in the role portraits. Secondary users and indirect users are not considered at this stage due to time and money constraints.

The customers of our products are mainly labor-intensive enterprises, and our product helps customers solve blue-collar employment and payroll compliance issues. Taking the recruitment business line as an example, if you want to sell this product to a certain company, you must first impress the company's HR director, then convince the CEO/chairman, and then let the recruitment department employees - HR try it out.

Then the key people in this decision-making chain include the HR director, CEO/chairman, and HR. In this case, the HR director is a key figure in the decision-making chain, because only after he approves will he apply to purchase or praise the product in front of the CEO.

HR is the user of the final product. Although they have no say before the company purchases the product, they have the greatest say during the renewal stage. For products in the growth stage, our current research goal is to obtain user portraits for two roles: HR director and HR, interviewing 4 to 6 people for each role.

2) What are the portrait dimensions?

After screening out the target users, what are the portrait dimensions?

Taking this case as an example, in the design of this user portrait, because our company's products are in the optimization and iteration stage, the purpose of making user portraits is to understand the user's usage, such as the frequency of use of each function, the problems encountered during use, locate the key issues and cause analysis, and optimize product functions and operation models. At the same time, we also hope to discover new opportunities by understanding the specific behavioral details and attitudes of users.

• For enterprises: mainly understand their enterprise scale, industry attributes, business processes, organizational structure, and what positions/jobs are there in the organization. This information is mainly collected by products or sales and should be placed in front of the persona. A large part of our first step of business research also comes from this.
• For decision makers: Mainly understand their demand information on enterprise management, business, etc. For this product, decision makers are concerned about issues such as revenue growth, efficiency improvement or cost reduction.
• For main users: focus on understanding user characteristics, product awareness, usage scenarios and pain points, the frequency of use of each function, and the problems encountered during use

Based on the user portrait elements mentioned above and the business situation, we selectively extracted and finally sorted out the user portrait dimensions of this case as follows:

3. Step 3: Determine the research method

After clarifying the research object, you can start the research. Generally, there are three ways:

1. Qualitative research: research based on small samples, such as user interviews, field research, and job rotations - to understand the causes of phenomena;
2. Quantitative research: collecting survey data from larger samples, such as questionnaire surveys, data analysis - discovering phenomena;
3. Quantitative + Qualitative Research: A combination of both.

Although quantitative and qualitative research each have their own advantages and disadvantages, quantitative research is relatively expensive and time-consuming, and also requires the assistance of people who are proficient in statistical analysis, and is not very practical in B-side research methods. For most teams, qualitative analysis is the most cost-effective and appropriate approach.

It not only provides information about “who the users are and what they want”, but is also a data-based, cost-effective and relatively fast method. The research method to be adopted is mainly determined by comprehensive considerations such as the enterprise life cycle, research purpose, project time and funding. In this case, we chose in-depth interviews to collect primary data.

4. Step 4: Collect character information

After clarifying the goals and methods, it is necessary to refine the entire research, develop a specific and detailed implementation plan, and start recruiting users to collect data. Interviews can be conducted through three phases of strategies: front, middle, and back.

1) Before the interview: Building a foundation of trust

In step 1 of building user portraits, we already have a certain understanding of the business and the user roles to be interviewed. You only need to design the interview outline based on the determined portrait dimensions 4-7 days before the interview.

The purpose of designing an outline is to avoid the conversation becoming divergent and confusing during the interview and being unable to collect enough valid information.

It should be noted that the outline needs to be detailed and meticulous for each requirement of the interview, and at the same time, the user's understanding of the interview topic must be considered. It can be developed in order from easy to difficult, objective to subjective, and general to specific, based on the order of product usage. For example, the frequency of use of a product function can be placed at the beginning of the question as an objective question.

The interview time should also be considered. Since the interview time should not be too long, the interview outline should not be too long. The typical interview outline template is shown below:

Informing the interviewees of the purpose of the interview in advance will allow them to see the direct or indirect value of the interview (improving work efficiency, reducing costs, etc.), and will also help build better trust between the two parties.

Therefore, we need to confirm the entire interview plan in advance and proactively inform the interviewee of relevant information, including the time, location, method, purpose, process of the interview, as well as possible issues that may be involved in the process and subsequent prizes.

2) During the interview: Demonstrate professionalism

Opening introduction: Just like C-end interviews, the opening remarks before the formal interview begin are very important! In addition to introducing myself again (no matter what position I am, I am a user researcher at this moment) and explaining the purpose of this interview, I must also emphasize the privacy and data security of the interview. After all, they are dealing with real money business.

Warm-up: Before the formal interview, you can chat with the user for 2-3 minutes to liven up the atmosphere through certain communication, making the user more relaxed and enhancing the user's trust in us. Warm-up and opening introductions can be interspersed with no absolute order of priority. After the interviewer finishes his self-introduction, the interviewee can also introduce himself.

General questions: General questions refer to some basic questions that users can answer without too much thinking, such as "What functions do you use most often?" and "How long do you use it?"

In-depth questions: In-depth questions are more in-depth explorations of user behaviors and thoughts, focusing more on the details of user behavior and the motivations behind the behavior. Generally when asking these questions, the interviewer needs to keep asking the user why until the user can no longer answer. In-depth questions are the core of the entire interview and are also the easiest way to uncover user needs and pain points.

Review and summary: A brief summary can be made after each part of the interview. The interviewer objectively explains the user's behavior and attitude by reviewing the interview process. This helps the interviewer sort out his or her thoughts and allows the user to reconfirm the interview results.

3) After the interview: achieving long-term win-win situation

It is best to establish long-term relationships with interviewees, especially front-line business personnel.

After people talk face to face, they will develop a basic sense of trust and goodwill. We should take advantage of the opportunity of the interview to narrow the distance with the business personnel. If you encounter problems in subsequent projects and want to obtain the most authentic first-hand feedback, you can contact the previous interviewees for help.

5. Step 5: Analysis and Modeling

1) Group interviewees by role

Write down the key information obtained from the user interview on sticky notes (or print and slice in Excel). Designers need to classify and group the interviewed users according to different product user roles, such as HR and HR director.

2) Identify behavioral variables

After grouping, it is necessary to identify key behavioral variables, match the surveyed users with the behavioral variables one by one, and identify differentiated behavioral patterns, as shown in the following figure:

3) Mapping the relationship between interview subjects and behavioral variables

Then summarize similar behavior patterns among different roles (combine similar items) and describe the behaviors. It should be noted here that when matching users based on behavioral variables, there is no need to pursue absolute accuracy, as long as the mapping is relatively clear.

After sorting out, it can be observed that certain user groups are concentrated on several behavioral variables, which form a significant behavioral pattern, thus clustering into a certain role type. By analogy, several different behavioral patterns can be discovered.

To ensure comprehensiveness, it is best to traverse after mapping to check whether there are any missing users or variables.

4) Find common behavior patterns

After completing the mapping, find the groups of objects that are on the variable axis. After sorting, if a group of objects are clustered on multiple different variables, it can represent that a type of role has significant common behavioral performance (usually each type of role will have 2 to 3 common behaviors).

Common behaviors can help us identify user needs that standardized products need to meet, while differentiated behaviors can provide customized services based on corporate needs. It is unlikely that a B-side product can meet the needs of all users.

6. Step 6: Portrait presentation

Once we find common behaviors, we can create user personas. Sort out the dimensional characteristics of each role, such as behavior, goals, pain points, etc., to form the basic framework of the portrait. Finally, we need to improve the user portrait. At this time, we mainly need to do the following:

1. Combined with real data, select typical features and add them to user portraits;
2. Combine usage scenarios to describe stories, and reflect behavioral variables and other factors in the description to make the portrait more full and realistic;
3. Making user portraits easy to remember, such as using photos, names, ages, and a few simple key feature descriptions, can reduce the reader's memory burden.

The final customer portrait is shown in the following figure: (The data has been anonymized and is not real data)

The final character portrait is as follows: (The data has been anonymized and is not real data)

5. Use of User Portraits

As a powerful design and communication tool, user portraits can keep stakeholders’ goals consistent. Their value lies in their dissemination and use. For example: In the 1990s, Cooper put the description of the user persona on a page and posted it on the wall, one page for each user persona of a product, so that the design team members could see it when they walked into the office every day.

Once the user portrait is created, it is important to share the defined user portrait with the entire project team. Do not let it gather dust in a shared document or hang on the wall as a decoration.

What you need to do is to make the user portrait jump off the paper and enter the hearts of your colleagues, so that it will be brought up naturally and spontaneously in every discussion and every decision. Therefore, the use of user portraits is extremely important, otherwise all the previous work will be in vain.

So, you may need:

• Introduce user portraits to the team: take some time to introduce the research process, show them photos, and talk about the needs, expectations, pain points, personality, etc. of the portrait. It is best to guide it in a story-based way and mention it and discuss it in meetings for a long time;
• Use user portrait in your user story: "If I were a ** business recruiter, I want to quickly identify the number of people recruited by a store and the number of people who are on duty today." When designing, take some time to imagine how software will be applied by users at work;
• Visit different teams to introduce user portraits, including where it comes from, how to use: teach them how to recruit representative users for quizzes, how to write user scenarios to inspire design or as a usability testing task.

In general, in places like your ability, promote the commercial value of user portraits and enhance everyone's trust. After all, user portraits can help the production and research teams break out of their needs and understand the needs of those who really use the products.

As more and more teams use user portraits, the user portraits will become more and more like a real user, helping the team design products from the user's perspective.

VI. Final

It is worth noting that user portraits are not static and are largely affected by the environment and cycles. Therefore, we need to regularly review our user portraits and update them to ensure consistency with reality.

Market changes and strategy changes may redefine your business audience, and other segments may appear, which is also a good opportunity to readjust user profiles, otherwise they will eventually lose their vitality. I hope your user profile can always help the business and help the experience.

Author: Xiaolu_lp

Source: Xiaolu_lp