Manage your app personas easier with a single core goal

In this post, I’ll be sharing the final results of a study on defining persona goals that we performed in Transifex a few months ago.

This first post will focus on the finalized core persona goal and share how this tool can help the company define an action plan to achieving positive outcomes. A later post will also cover the process of concluding the personas and their core goals.

I will start by sharing the characteristics of the localization industry — that Transifex is active on — so that it’s easier for you to identify possible common characteristics.

Background on the localization setting

Localization software is a very niche field that is becoming more and more relevant these days — due to the increase in online activity in more industries.

A characteristic that makes it hard to define a specific key persona, is that localization is usually an afterthought on a software service. This means that a company enters localization way late in their processes, where some stuff is already established. It also means that the person kickstarting localization and making decisions can vary — from the developer assigned to “apply localization in our project” to a translator that can identify and suggest linguistic fixes on the core language of a project.

All in all, defining a single key persona cannot cover all cases, as these vary depending on the person you’re talking with about localization.

A quick look at the user persona

The complexity shared above made it hard to put in use user personas. In the past, we had developed user personas yet communicating and sharing the why’s on a day-to-day basis — even internally — was problematic.

A translator’s reviewer user persona

Having a user persona was not helpful when matters of prioritization and decision were needed on a higher level, like “FeatureA or FeatureB?”, or like “FeatureA should include functionality X or Y?”. These questions required some deeper research and investigating the interactions between personas.

Finally, being a niche market Saas team, discussing the above decisions and questions with teams and new colleagues was hard. Mapping and understanding each request a customer shared, each decision a customer made on using the platform, and any upcoming feature was difficult.

Enter core persona goal

Trying to work on this problem in a way that would be tangible and easily digestible by many people — with varied knowledge over the localization journey — is how the core persona goal came to be.

A core persona goal is actually a sentence that describes the major outcome that this archetype person is trying to achieve over the field of interest — in this case, localization — . That sentence is complemented by a graph outlining the core journey into services/actions that are required for achieving the said outcome.

A translator’s single goal and respecting graph

By analyzing what we see in the image above for the Translator persona we have:

• A core goal sentence: “I want to deliver good translations fast, to be paid”
• A high-level graph, showing the tasks/actions needed to achieve that goal. In the translator’s case, this journey could be spelled as: “An amount of content assigned to the translator to work on, that then needs to do her work translating that content, and finally deliver the finished work back”. The crown icon (👑) in the “translation” task is what the specific persona identifies as their most valuable contribution in this journey. The final task/action — on green background — is where the outcome delivered is impacting actual people using the application. In this case, the “Work delivered” task is where a person using the translated app can see the outcome that the translator has delivered.

The core persona goal is basically applying The ONE Thing from Gary Keller and Jerry Papasan to each persona. It goes something like:

What’s the ONE Thing this persona can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

So this is the core of the idea! What we did next, was to apply this exact concept to all personas related to localization.

Graph outlines for all personas

Some extra color and shape coding on the image above is:

• Blue-colored shapes are directly related to localization, meaning that we — the team developing the app — can directly impact. Both grey and green colored shapes are tasks happening outside the software’s “jurisdiction”, in this case, the Transifex app.
• Cloud shapes represent tasks/actions that the specific persona does not control and have an abstract idea of how this task is done. In the Translator’s example, the “Assigned work” task is out of control of the translator.

The core persona goal as a tool

With the above as a starting point there are many directions one can take — depending on the department she belongs to — :

• The Sales team can adjust the discussion with prospects after understanding their core goal. This way Sales team can speak more of feature X or Y that fits the core goal, or of workflow A that is vital for the persona.
• The Marketing team can adjust blog post content and ad campaigns, properly targeting specific journeys and the core goal of each persona.
• The Customer Success team can promote speaking of expected outcomes that land directly on the persona’s core goal.
• The Product team can do roadmap planning and prioritization based on the core persona of interest.
• The User Experience team can use the core persona goals and graphs to properly design and re-evaluate that core goal through research and interviews.
• The Leadership team can strategize based on core persona goals to include or exclude specific personas from the long-term vision and strategy for the company.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, will be sharing more on HOW we reached solid core persona goals and journeys in a later post. As expected, it is vital to have solid reasoning and data that are backing up the core persona goal tools!

Using the core persona goal tool from a product perspective

What follows are some examples of putting to use the created tools — from a product’s eye which I’m a part of.

Additional analysis & breakdown of the core goal helped in identifying and relating the outcome goal with the specifics of an application. By performing that analysis, we got one step closer to the bolts and gears of an app — the features — . Follows an image with the analysis for the Translator core goal.

Breakdown by sentence, and then into categories of actions needed

The starting point is the core goal sentence which is then broken down into parts before further analyzed. In the Translator’s persona case, this break down is done to:

• Deliver good translations, connecting the verb “deliver” with the adjective “good” and the object “translations”. This sub-sentence is setting some expectations in terms of tools and features needed to achieve what the sentence describes
• Deliver…fast, with a similar breakdown and the implied object being “the translator”.
• ..to be paid, sub-sentence is focusing on the outcome of the specific persona’s actions and ways to validate those actions to achieve the required outcome, which is “to be paid”.

With this analysis in place, we can identify current and future features that address specific needs. For example, “Additional tools as boosters” for the Translators are external glossaries or auto-correctors — like Grammarly — which make their work faster.

Going a few steps deeper on this analysis, we identified needs that are overlapping between personas and created a connections graph to signify interdependencies. This way we could identify whether de-focusing from persona1 will affect other personas and at what level.

Thicker lines represent a stronger connection between personas

The above idea is loosely based on what the Connected book, by Christakis and Fowler, talks about.

A high-level analysis of the whole personas graphs helped to validate some assumptions that we consistently saw from our customers.

Graph outlines for all personas

Some high-level observations that are share-able are:

• “Crowns” overlap on the final — value to the end-user— step on two personas core goals, mean that these two personas can easier communicate with each other. They both share the same appreciation for the value to the end-user so they can align over that value, and thus influence one another’s decisions.
• All personas share a common exchange of data layer — that’s the lines connecting each task or action — so the need for integrations that can shift data to and from tasks is shared for all. All personas can understand the need and impact that integrations have.

Next steps with core persona goal

Like shared earlier, the above framework cannot take decisions on your behalf, but it’s a strong toolset that can drive discussions and observations for each department separately as well as for the whole company collectively.

Having defined personas and their single-most-important core goal, you and your company can shift your focus where is mostly needed.

In regards to using this framework on Transifex, the next steps include application to more departments — especially in marketing and design — , as well as a re-evaluation of the persona goals to keep them up-to-date.

Thank you for reading this far. Any comments and discussion are more than welcome!