Creating User Personas to Tell Data Stories

Juicebox boasts a wide variety of users who all prefer to experience their data stories in different ways. Some users like to follow the story chronologically, some like to jump around to different parts of the story, and others prefer to simply sit back and explore the story. Our top priority is making sure that all of our users are able to achieve their different goals while using Juicebox's Guided Story Design. In order to ensure that this happens, we've created user personas. Here are the steps we took to create our user personas that you can recreate with your own users.

The first thing we did was sit down with our users and ask them questions. A lot of questions. Our personas were not created from what we think our users’ behaviors and goals are, but instead were born from real conversations with the real people who use Juicebox. Without the specific comments our users were able to provide us about their  wants, needs, and desires, we would not have been able to create successful user personas.

The second thing we did once we had collected this juicy information was to share it with everyone in our organization. We didn’t want to keep these critical details limited to a small number of people at Juice - we wanted everyone to feel as if they knew each of our users’ preferences and needs on a personal level. When sharing the information we also wanted to make it fun and easy to reference, so we made playing cards for each of our personas and spread them around the offices. Now whenever Juicers talk about product design, they can use the cards to make sure that all types of users are included in the big decisions being made about how our stories are structured.

Once you create your user personas, it's important to remember that users' behaviors, preferences, and goals are constantly changing. To ensure that we are always correct in our user personas and our ideas of what they need, we monitor users' actions with Fullstory. The benefits of being able to monitor our product use this way are seemingly endless. For example, when a user experiences confusion with the functionality of our product, we’re able to know about it immediately and address it.

Successfully taking large groups of our users, discovering how they prefer to experience our Guided Story Design, and humanizing them through persona playing cards has allowed us to walk a mile in the shoes of our users. This ability has fostered a strong sense of empathy for our users because we truly believe that we understand their preferences in a data product and can share the feelings they experience while using Juicebox. Using these tools as a concerted effort to bring the user into the front of everyone’s mind at Juice Analytics has been instrumental to our success. Because we truly care about users’ experience when navigating the stories we tell with their data, we’ll continue to strive to create the most engaging and insightful stories possible. And now that you know the secrets to our success, you can too. 

Want to learn more about Juicebox? We want to tell you about it! Send us a message at info@juiceanalytics.com or click the link below to schedule a demo.