Redesigning how CX teams create, manage, and present personas — transforming a feature that was never shown in sales demos into something the team was proud to lead with.
Cemantica already had a Persona feature — but it was essentially invisible in the sales process. The Customer Success team had quietly stopped including it in demos because it didn't look professional next to competitors, and clients who tried it ran into friction immediately.
The problems were concrete: text overflowed out of persona cards with no graceful truncation, image uploads were technically broken for some formats, and the overall layout looked dated compared to tools like TheyDo and JourneyTrack. There was also no way to easily manage or reuse personas across multiple journey maps.
From the sales team: enterprise prospects were specifically asking about persona management during demos. When the feature looked weak, it was affecting conversion in competitive evaluations against TheyDo and Smaply.
This wasn't just a UX polish task — it had a direct commercial signal attached to it, which helped us prioritize it and get buy-in to do it properly.
Before jumping to redesign, I needed to understand the real usage patterns — not just the reported pain points. The existing feature had been around for two years, so there was real behavioural data to learn from.
Mapping the persona creation experience end-to-end surfaced issues that users had simply accepted as normal — like having to scroll horizontally to see all their personas, or re-entering the same person's name across multiple journey maps.
These weren't things users mentioned in surveys because they'd stopped expecting better. Seeing the full journey made the opportunity much larger than the original brief.
"I spend 20 minutes every time reformatting the persona card before I can put it in a client presentation. It never looks quite right."
Redesign the persona card to handle edge cases gracefully, look polished in presentation contexts, and introduce a global persona library so teams can manage personas as a first-class object — not just a journey map attachment.
I deliberately looked outside the journey mapping category for inspiration, because every tool in the space had the same visual approach. Better references came from profile cards in HR tools, contact management in CRMs, and character sheets in collaborative writing tools.
From LinkedIn: The "above the fold" hierarchy — photo, name, headline visible immediately without scrolling. Everything else secondary.
From Notion databases: The concept of a persona as a record that exists independently of any single page — queryable, filterable, reusable.
From Figma community cards: How to make a constrained card feel spacious through typography hierarchy rather than trying to fit everything at equal visual weight.
TheyDo had the best visual polish but persona fields were rigid — you couldn't add custom attributes without a workaround.
JourneyTrack allowed custom fields but the card layout got messy quickly. Neither solved the reuse across maps problem elegantly.
Our opportunity: flexible custom fields + clean card design + a proper global library. No competitor had all three.
I ran three rounds of design exploration, testing each with 4–6 users including both existing customers and prospects who had evaluated Cemantica during the sales process.
The final design shipped three connected improvements: a redesigned persona card, a global persona library, and a smarter image handling system. Together they addressed every friction point identified in research.
We built a live preview panel into the edit modal — as you type, the card updates in real time on the right side. This eliminated the "I can't see how it will look" anxiety that the old experience created.
The custom fields editor lets teams add, remove, and reorder fields with drag-and-drop. Field types include text, number, tag list, and URL — covering the full range of what we saw in user research.
The biggest unlock in this project was treating personas as first-class objects rather than journey map attachments. That single architectural decision — the global library — made almost every other improvement possible and set up future roadmap items like persona analytics and persona-based filtering of journey insights.