Customer Profiles & Interviews

Customer profiles and interviews outline the users’ goals, needs, motivations, and contexts in relation to the product and/or service. Creating a profile, or customer sketch, provides us with practical insights that may not have been apparent at first. Completing this activity, our team can collaborate with you to develop customer archetypes that are representative of your intended audiences. It allows us to see who the customers or users are, which in turn helps us to walk in their shoes and gain insights into how and why they interact with your products, services and environments.

Our Approach

Pivot’s customer profiles provide our designers with informative character sketches that represent real users. Each customer or end-user segment is given a name, face, age, personality, context of use, and other details that help bring it to life for project stakeholders. For each project we can create three to eight profiles. Interviews with key customers or users are then conducted in order to verify the information gathered in the customer profiles. The interviews help Pivot’s designers to make informed decisions and take the guess-work out of understanding your customers.

Profiles become even more powerful tools when combined with usage scenarios. These are descriptions that outline how a persona interacts with and uses your products. Scenarios also help to outline customer touchpoints. One of the ways to gather this detail is through a Pivot’s worksession with stakeholders and customers. Another method for gathering profile and scenario data is through field research and observation. The final format report is provided using data visualization — highly visual formats of explaining information — such as storyboards, presentation slides or short motion pieces.

Pivot’s design process relies on customer profiles and interviews as design evidence — tools that are used to build the strategic framework for the project. We return regularly to these profiles throughout the design process as practical reminders of whom we are designing for.

Benefits

• Increases the chances that the future design will meet customer needs and expectations;
• Provides business and design team evidence for future design;
• Helps visualize customer motivations, needs and goals;
• De-risks the design investment and prevents the need for costly changes after launch or delivery.