Cisco PX Cloud persona nomenclature
A quick content exercise
After years of carefully conducting studies, our user research team was almost ready to unveil a master list of user personas for PX Cloud enterprise software. The final piece of the puzzle: naming these personas. The team had established some names a long while ago, but recent changes to the personas meant that some of them were no longer a good fit. Before the presentation, I was called in to assess the situation and make last-minute changes.
My approach
Rule-setting
At the outset, I created some quick ground rules about what each name needed to accomplish. They needed to:
Be distinct from one another
Give an immediate sense to what the persona does
Encapsulate most of their story.
Interviews
In lieu of thorough test-driving (no time), I scheduled quick 1:1s with various colleagues and asked them to provide impressions of what they thought the personas did, based solely on their names.
Assessment
Based on this feedback, I identified several persona names as potentially confusing, then came up with a shortlist of options to replace them.
Brainstorming
At the same time, I proposed an alternate approach to change all the names (currently based on function) to ones that instead reflected their place in the overall workflow (such as “initiator,” “reviewer,” and “closer”).
Refinement
This approach was (understandably) rejected by the research team, but they accepted my original shortlist of function-based names. We continued refining these over the next few days.
Results
Finally, we agreed upon a set of names that fulfilled the ground rules. These were debuted across Cisco the next day and used across the product team to inform all PX Cloud experiences from that point on.
