Team Personas and Experience Maps

Paul Brooks wrote this article for UX Magazine about developing personas for team. Personas are a stand-in for a group of people who share common goals. They are fictional representatives—archetypes based on the users’ behaviors, attitudes, and goals. Usually we make the distinction between Buyer Personas and User Personas where the Buyer is the person that makes the purchase decision and the User is the person who uses the solutions. In Paul’s article, he introduces us to Team Personas.

Paul shares that in Ken Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager, Ken describes teams as “dynamic, complex, ever-changing, living systems that—just like individuals—have behavior patterns and lives of their own.” and derived these characteristics of a Team Persona:

Name: What is the name and location of the team?
Demographic: What are the team’s goals? Who does the team report to?
Pain Points: What is the team struggling with?
Potential Solutions: What might help the team in their situation?
To Do List: What are the team’s priorities?

Paul also goes on to share an Experience Map for Team:

Experience maps show the goals, interaction points, and the associated emotions throughout an activity or process. Mapping out the experience of the team as an individual is a great way to see the situation at a high level. One of the main characteristics of effective teams mentioned in the sequel is “active participation by everyone,” so consider gathering the whole team together at this stage of the design. Using this information, you can create the individual users’ experience maps separately in finer detail.

So the next time you are defining or designing an experience, think beyond the usual Customer and User Personas and Journey Maps and give some thought to the Team.