A solid digital strategy begins with establishing a company-based digital persona. Blue Shield of California had created brand and company personas over the years but lacked research-based personas that could help our digital product teams, designers, researchers, and developers empathize with our many target audiences, better define priorities, and understand user concerns - fundamental to creating exceptional products.

A mixed team of 4 junior and senior researchers, led by myself have been carrying out this project from January 2021 to present, with the support of digital product leadership and collaboration from product partners.

The goal was to develop research-based and digital-specific personas worthy of agile storytelling.

These personas aimed to assist Blue Shield of California employees designing content or experiences on any online communication and engagement channels facing our Prospect, Member, Broker, Employer, and Provider customers. A foreseen challenge was utilization of personas once developed and our strategy involved including potential persona end-users as stakeholders early and often in the process.

• Overall project planning and oversight of other 4 researchers as Manager, UX Research

• Led workshops, designed discussion guides, conducted interviews, and completed qualitative coding

The process for each set of personas began by capturing knowledge from our product as well as customer support teams, establishing what we already knew with early user profiles or proto-personas.

• Two workshops were held per product group (Prospect, Member, Broker, Employer, Provider). Part 1 involved facilitating the identification and listing of all user characteristics. In Part 2, we asked stakeholders to help sort these characteristics or questions into categories.

• My role specifically involved leading product workshops for Broker, Prospect, and Member teams.

The next stage involved gathering what we didn’t know through moderated sessions with real users.

• Questions and characteristics (plan type, age, etc) identified during earlier product workshops helped with recruitment strategy and designing discussion guides.

• Participant interviews completed: 79

  • Prospect: 13

  • Member: 25

  • Broker: 10

  • Employer: 18

  • Provider: 13

Data was then analyzed to see what themes stood out. We used Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb to bring structure around areas important to good user experience and break these down even further based on persona type.

• Notes were sorted by at least 2 researchers and further validated through card sorts completed by our whole team.

The role of conducting interviews, coding, and creating card sorts were distributed across the team and myself due to the high volume of participant data.

This project drove the development of the following persona template and are in final stages for all 5 product areas (Prospect, Member, Broker, Employer, and Provider) with a grand total 21 personas. These documents are being refined. I am leading a roadshow across our digital organization based on area of interest to begin application in the 2022 product roadmap.

The complete set of personas is currently being finalized and starting to be shared with all relevant teams but this project has been a highlight and challenge in terms of product and research collaboration. With other priorities for all those involved, it often became difficult to schedule sessions and process updates and maintain the necessary partnership but we did. I hope to see better utilization of these personas due to this early involvement and investment from our partners as well as continued iteration.

Next steps include creating scenarios and Journey Maps through additional think-out-loud studies.