Innovation & Human-Centered Design in the Age of COVID -19 — Developing Temporal Personas

The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated emerging trends and challenges in many industries and Human Centred Design practice have not been immune. For many companies, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced a reckoning with the data and truths we think we know about our customers. How do we capture the customer experience to enable just-in-time responsiveness to a crisis? And for Human-Centered Design (HCH) practices, the functional charge is to better capture customer experiences, often primarily in digital channels, to improve service delivery.

Under pressing needs of better understanding the customer, and in order to rationalize efforts and initiatives during the crisis, HCD specialists have been the “first response” functional teams enlisted as part of COVID-19 taskforces, with the mission of providing insights of the most efficient ways to channel customers to relevant resources, at a time when the staff was scarce or overwhelmed. For those companies with strong values centred around the customers and a dedicated HCD team, they were undoubtedly more responsive and propose alternative or additional support. Employing many of the tried and true methodologies, such as Design Thinking (a hallmark of more advanced HCD teams), companies are able to be responsive to employing such things as generating personas that can guide how the company remains reactive in a crisis.

Temporal Persona Creation

Persona creation is by far the most tried and true method that allows companies to begin to view customers as having goals with underlying motives — in other words, it is a tool for surfacing empathy, the key ingredient in optimal service delivery. The COVID -19 crisis has demonstrated that an HCD approach, utilizing tools such as provisional personas, helps anticipate or offer educated guess when information is fragmented or just too much to be gathered in short notice. Given the ability to rapidly generate personas in the midst of a crisis is critical. In the case of the project in question, and while most of the details are proprietary, our team took a novel approach to persona and understood that, in any crisis, a customer assumes a specific temporal posture — from Readiness — Response — Stabilization — Recovery. Therefore, a temporal persona illustrates a state of mind at different stages of the crisis. Utilizing this framework to drive persona development, enabled the bundling of key messages, functionalities and saliency of key customer information. Using an underlying temporal model, the team also considered the company’s streams of businesses against the temporal states of the crisis and situated our personas over top, ensuring a centricity of customers at all times.

Same but not the same — Customers have unique crises

All customers are on their unique journey and at different points in time. One may have been affected by COVID-19 today; the other has already recovered, one may have been laid off a month ago, while the other will in a few weeks. Everyone starts the journey at a different point in time, with a different mindset, but they all connect to your website, app or point of sale simultaneously and you have to address all of these needs, urgently. Understanding this overlay as the background was critical in ensuring that content was responsive to our customers. Having this compound view of the customer enabled a better structuring of the information architecture that was critically needed to serve customers. We understood that in a crisis, customers will not all have the same level of focus or energy at interacting with digital platforms and may not all even use the same channels of engagement. This provided a good opportunity to stress-test various service channels in various and meaningful ways. It must also be mentioned that this just in time HCD approach was also critical to support the already overload call centres.

Takeaways

Overall, this experience served to inform other aspects of business operations. Specifically, building or updating persona in the light of the COVID -19 crisis helped identify gaps in ongoing operations and enabling agile adjustments, supporting the choice of laser-focused research projects, providing guidance on information architecture and key content. The COVID-19 crisis was an opportunity to deepen the practice and reinforce some HCD concepts that were sometimes hard to evangelize in the course of a normal project: the importance of holistic persona illustrating various and evolutive needs across business and functions and time.

HCD practice is often entrenched in a specific project with the role of visualizing risks and opportunities and document progress to build a successful customer journey, which, ultimately should translate in a better conversion, retention or satisfaction rate. These types of goals focused on incremental changes and should be part of a well-established health check-up for any activity. Yet, in order to point to major changes was instigated by the opportunities brought by a crisis, such as COVID -19. This suggests that there is a need to change for a broader lens of HCD that is not just responsive to the moment but anticipatory.

We must consider customers are exposed to a new environment which might affect them deeply emotionally, socially and affect the daily habitual tasks. Admittedly, customers their own less visible cases of crisis. How does HCD support these lesser-known crises faced by our customers which do not affect only the well-rounded customer profile? This project also surfaced what we have known as HCD practitioners and that is, in looking at our customers, we must look at how we respond holistically to the unique collision of their needs and not through the corporate prism that often sees the customer as a diced- up entity.

If you know someone who would appreciate reading this in French — this is a joint effort with my dear friend and colleague Chloe Benaroya French version is here.

Thank you! Merci!