Every successful company focuses its attention on understanding customers’ needs but rarely focuses the same level of awareness towards their employees.

The personas help project members understand and empathize with user groups they may never see face to face.

The project’s goal was to understand Mayo Clinic’s employees better, so designers, developers, and analysts could create better products and services; if the employees were supported with user-friendly tools and resources, they would provide better patient care.

Several unique challenges faced the team. Creating personas on this scale was new territory, even for the vendor who worked with Mayo Clinic to develop the methodology they now use. Additionally, creating personas that are not project-specific posed difficulty because they didn’t know what kind of information they would need to gather ahead of time.

Mayo Clinic has launched several successful products using these personas and saving time and money by giving a usable quality product.

Key takeaways:

• Why institutional personas are essential and how personas help the project team understand and empathize with users
• Steps used in the process of creating institutional personas and usage of personas
• Challenges faced during the creation and maintenance process of the institutional personas
• Best practices of persona validation process and governance
• What others learn from our approach to promoting empathy for users

Webinar with John A. Schultz, Senior User Experience Designer, Mayo Clinic.

John Schultz is a Senior User Experience Designer and works on the enterprise intranet team in Enterprise Technology Services at Mayo Clinic. He has provided strategy and design for various clinical and operational design projects spanning from intranet sites and related initiatives to digital signage and the media-on-demand system. John has over 20 years of experience working in visual and UX design and holds a BFA in Visual Communication.