In order to create a strategic product that meets your user’s needs, developing personas can be a powerful tool to help you understand them. In this Tech in 2, Senior Consultant Marcelle Carlson walks you through how to develop personas in your organization.
Personas are a basic foundational design and product strategy tool. You really need to understand who your user is in order to create a strategic product that will be able to meet your user’s needs. So typically, you create a persona by doing a lot of user interviews and research upfront. You look at the patterns and behaviors of your users and then create this fictional character from that information.
If you do not have a specific person dedicated to creating a persona, I love to create proto-personas. It’s basically creating a persona with the entire team’s input and their understanding of who the user is. Today, you don’t do any additional research. You basically get everyone in the room, take 60 to 90 minutes, and throw out all your ideas of who this user is.
Proto-personas, you’re not doing all of that upfront research, but the great thing about what you’re doing is that, in addition to getting the team into alignment, once you go into doing user interviews, once you’re doing usability studies with those users, you’re able to look back at that proto-persona and update it as you go. So you’re always going back and validating, and you’re making sure it changes as you learn more. Proto-personas work really well in the context of agile development because you are learning as the team learns, and you’re adding to that proto-persona and moving it forward.
If you don’t have a proto-persona or a persona, you could start designing for yourself, which even the best designers do it. You can also start designing specifically for what the client thinks or what another person associated with the project thinks. When it’s really about the user, it’s really designing. You really want to build and design products that meet their needs and their pain points.
Adaptation in Software Modernization
Traditionally, capital investments were very concrete (ie building a factory on the river because you needed water to power the mill), but nowadays in software development, things are easier to change. In this Tech in 2, Director of Solution Engineering Jackson Stakeman shares why adapting your strategies to accommodate for change is key and why you should employ the Wayne Gretzky method of skating to where the puck is going to be.
Modernization in the Insurance Industry
Platform modernization is becoming an increasing priority for insurers, particularly for tenured insurers with legacy applications. In this Tech in 2, Client Services Partner John Suminski discusses the many benefits of modernizing in the insurance industry and why keeping applications current is so important.
Three First Steps to Cloud Modernization
Modernizing in the Cloud allows you to reduce tech debt and take advantage of the benefits of modern technology. In this Tech in 2, Principal AWS Consultant Jeff Pabian shares the three first steps you should take if you want to modernize in the Cloud.
How Sparq Uses Generative AI
Sparq began using generative AI tools in early 2023, when we started offering it to our customers as an option on their projects. In this Tech in 2, Chief Engineering Officer Janet Pierce shares where we've found the most success with AI, the productivity gains we're seeing and how other organizations can get started with it.