ITX is excited to announce the first episode of the ITX Product Momentum Podcast! In this episode, Sean Flaherty and Joe Hoffend discuss the importance of developing personas for your product users, and how ITX implements these personas throughout software product development.
They are joined by guest, Jeremy Durham, the Director of Program, Product and UX at Paychex, based in Rochester, NY, to hear about his experience in using personas in the development of their platform. Jeremy is a key member of the Product Development and Technology Senior Management team at Paychex, overseeing 200 employees. Throughout his 20 years of growth working for Paychex, Jeremy has held a number of titles, including Senior Software Engineer; Enterprise Program Manager; and Senior Manager of Product, Technology Strategy, and Client Experience.
Effective persona development should accurately represent the greatest number of your users in your system and answer the question, “who are we designing for?” A persona should identify – what are the users’ concerns? What are the jobs they’re trying to get done? How do we help them with their frustrations when using our products?
The goal of personas is to create alignment around who it is your team is developing a product for, so that every team member can better serve users’ needs and concerns. Personalizing the user helps the team better empathize with users in the context that they use your product.
Personas guide us in the decisions we make in every aspect of product development. A great persona is one that helps your team inform those subtle feature decisions that can inspire and connect with your users. Users should drive all of the decisions when developing a product.
It’s best to develop these representations of the needs and wants of users through research – most importantly, from user interviews. The development of a persona should include high-level demographics, technical knowledge, device usage, and behavioral traits, as they relate to the product.
To take a deeper dive into how to best develop and implement user personas, check out Episode 1: Personas on iTunes, Android, and Google Play. Let us know how helpful the podcast was with a rating and a review!
