Persona Management Feature

A widely used feature that Sales rarely showcased

The challenge was to improve the experience without changing the existing workflow, creating a cleaner, more flexible profile that supported both everyday documentation and compelling presentations.

The existing persona page used a three-column layout with various controls, but it was mostly made up of text boxes for persona background, needs, expectations, and more.

Four research activities, one focused scope

The redesign was driven by several complementary research activities, each helping us understand the problem from a different perspective.

1. 01Sales feedback
2. 02Customer survey
3. 03Internal workshop
4. Redesign
5. 04Design partner validation
6. Development

1. 01
   Sales team

   Sales feedback

   The project began with feedback from our Sales team, who felt the existing Persona feature wasn't visually strong enough for product demonstrations. They wanted persona profiles that better showcased the platform's capabilities while remaining practical for customers.

2. 02
   Customers

   Customer survey

   We surveyed customers to understand how they created personas, what information they included, and how the feature supported their daily work. The survey showed that most teams treated personas as living documents, relying heavily on detailed text and only occasionally using images or other visual elements.

3. 03
   Product · Sales · Customer Success

   Cross-functional workshop

   Together with the Product, Sales, and Customer Success teams, we mapped the complete Persona Management journey, identifying user goals, pain points, and Jobs to Be Done.

   The workshop uncovered opportunities across the entire feature. For this redesign, we intentionally focused on improving the existing profile experience rather than introducing new functionality.

   
4. 04
   Design partners

   Design partner validation

   Before development, we validated the redesigned experience with a small group of design partner customers in a workshop facilitated by the Product Manager, a CX Consultant, and me.

   The workshop included two parts:

   • Best practices for creating effective persona profiles.
   • Presenting the redesigned experience and collecting customer feedback before development.

   Customers described the redesigned profile as cleaner, simpler, and easier to understand, giving the team confidence to move forward with development.

Three core tensions shaping the redesign

Learning from flexible document experiences

I reviewed customer-journey tools such as TheyDo and JourneyTrack, along with persona templates in Notion and the flexible document experience in monday.com.

The exploration helped define three design directions:

1. 1

   A clearer visual hierarchy for presenting persona information.

2. 2

   Flexible content blocks that support different profile structures.

3. 3

   Better treatment of long text and supporting images.

Persona structure

Journey connection

Flexible content blocks

Editable document experience

From a complex form to a simpler editing experience

The existing persona editor relied on a structured three-column layout and predefined input types. While this provided consistency, it also made the experience feel rigid and cognitively demanding, especially when creating detailed persona profiles.

The redesign focused on simplifying the editing experience without changing the underlying functionality.

Three principles guided the redesign:

1. 1

   Reduce cognitive load

   Replace the complex multi-column form with a clean, linear editing experience that feels more natural and easier to scan.

   In the UI: Linear document-style layout
2. 2

   Let content drive the structure

   Instead of forcing users to choose input types for every field, allow them to build the profile by adding simple content blocks, similar to editing a document.

   In the UI: Simple content blocks
3. 3

   Simplify profile editing

   Demographic information was redesigned using straightforward label-and-value text inputs, removing unnecessary configuration while preserving flexibility.

   In the UI: Simplified demographic fields

A document-like editing experience for persona profiles

The redesign transformed the persona editor from a structured form into a simpler, document-like editing experience. Instead of navigating a three-column layout and configuring different field types, users can now build a persona by adding flexible content sections, similar to working in Notion.

This approach reduces cognitive load while making the profile easier to create, edit, and maintain. To further simplify the experience, demographic information was redesigned using straightforward text inputs for labels and values, eliminating the need to configure individual input types while still supporting different customer needs.

The result is a cleaner editing experience that feels familiar, flexible, and better suited for both documenting customer research and presenting personas to stakeholders.

Cleaner profiles, stronger demos, clearer roadmap

The redesigned Persona Management experience was successfully delivered to production as an improvement to an existing feature.

What I'm most proud of