MSC B2B Digital Personas
Overview
I led user research to understand how users interact with website features and synthesize the behaviors, mindsets, environments, and activities that can guide user-centered design (web) decision-making for personalization.
Developed MSC's first digital personas with product and marketing based on 20+ Interviews and synthesized the behaviors, mindsets, environments, and activities of users into 4 visual profiles guided user-centered design (web) decision-making for personalization (Accounts, Order History, List).
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
METHODS
Workshops
In-depth User Interviews
Empathy Mapping
Analysis & Insights
TOOLS
Figma
How might we build a holistic and relatable representation of MSC users across different segments, to better reflect their needs and mental models using MSC ecosystems?
PROBLEM DEFINITION
MSC knowledge pool about website users mostly consists of individual perspectives and task-based challenges. This creates a fragmented view of users and a lack of unified understanding of users between marketing, product, sales and customer service departments.
Without a holistic understanding of users, it is more difficult to align our value proposition with user needs and envision future solutions for the MSC ecosystem
RESEARCH SETUP
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PREPARE - RESEARCH FRAMING
WORKSHOP WITH ACCOUNT MANAGERS & CUSTOMER SERVICE
Led workshop with 10 participants who manage multiple business accounts across Large, Medium, and Small segments and our dedicated customer support who already have relation with the customer and understand customers' behaviors and challenges
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From the workshop, we were able to identify the roles of the customers from multiple industries into account types on the website
Note: MSC associates at large and medium size companies play a buyer role in placing orders on behalf of the customers.
USER INTERVIEWS
Sampling & Recruitment Strategy
A challenge of UXR in B2B services is recruiting users, who are often busy and not motivated by financial incentives. Instead of directly contacting users, I involved MSC representatives in research, who connected us to potential participants, while providing tremendous insights about challenges that our users face.
Primary Research Participants
Conducted 20 interviews with the participation of one observer, and sometimes the account manager who already has relation with the customer.
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ANALYSIS & SYNTHYSIS
As we gathered our notes and observations, we started seeing interesting overlaps, contradictions and frictions in how users perform tasks on MSC website.
Empathy Map
While the conventional product development approach was very focused on tasks, we wanted to bring our clients, their aspirations and frustrations alive in the eyes of internal stakeholders who never have a chance to directly interact with them. Thus, in the second stage we conducted empathy mapping using data from 5 interviews.
What do our buyers say, do, think and feel about their MSC interactions?
