Client: Woz U
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
UX Artifact: User Persona
Woz U, founded by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, trains individuals for careers in Software Development, Cyber Security, and Data Science by partnering with schools as an Education-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider of curriculum. They help businesses upskill their teams to stay competitive in the global economy and work to play a role in closing the tech talent skills gap.
As a leading Ed Tech platform, Woz U leveraged my UX experience to build the profile of a main user archetype and to gain a much better understanding of their ideal customer.
MEET GABRIELA
Meet Gabriela in greater detail (opens a new window)
THE PROBLEM
The Woz U Student Recruitment Team was analyzing their lead generation data and realized they were capturing a number of leads which only contained an email address. The Woz Blog, search engines (through keyword and organic searches), and various social media publishing had been effective enough in bringing visitors to the company website and company landing pages, but without actionable data.
For Woz, a marketing qualified lead (MQL) was defined as a lead minimally including an email address and phone number. Due to this discrepancy in data, the team was doomed for failure with leads of this nature, often unable to capitalize on these potential customers. The team needed a way to optimize their efforts, to gather additional information from these individuals, and to convert strangers into sales.
THE SOLUTION
In order to help the Recruitment team with their lead conversion process, I explained the necessity for building a user persona. I would craft an incarnation of their idea customer; an archetypical user developed from user analytics and engagement data, whose goals and characteristics represented the needs of a larger group. Seeing this user in detail, well beyond a customer segment, would allow the team powerful insights into the product’s target audience and the user’s habits and preferences. An actual person with a face, thoughts, fears, and a purpose. A real human with real problems would allow the Recruitment team to gain empathy by thinking of them, and gain traction by speaking to them and designing for them.
Personas allow for the creation of marketing assets and nurturing campaigns that serve real users. The creation of an “Email (only)” persona here would allow the Student Recruitment Team to understand their prospective clients near the top of the funnel and to turn those leads into customers.
Using this design artifact as a key point of reference during the rest of the design process, the Recruitment Team was able to:
- Better understand their consumers’ mindset and how to help get the user toward their intended goal
- Strengthen company assets, including social media advertisements and Calls To Action (CTAs)
- Split their subsequent landing pages into two, targeting:
- Users at the top of the funnel who may have whimsically clicked a Facebook post and had not yet received any information
- Users who had already read through a cursory amount of information, who had sought the company out and needed more specific and/or detailed information
- Massage chatbot scripts, humanizing the vernacular and the dialogue
- Update chat agents methods and optimize live chat scripts: coaching agents to answer questions, to provide services, and to build rapport (first) before scaring off potential purchasers with spasmodic requests for additional information
- Bring these users much further down the sales funnel
- Turn more email-only leads into paying customers
