Enhancing Global Player's User Experience through Persona-Based Insights
Unlocking the power of data to transform 2 million listeners' habits into user personas to help drive engagement and personalise user experiences.
New hire means fresh eyes.
Global Player serves a diverse audience of 2 million users, each with unique listening habits and preferences. When I joined the team, we had five talented product designers working non-stop to improve the user experience, but we lacked a clear understanding of our users’ listening habits. This made it difficult to make informed design decisions for new products and features. While we had a wealth of data, it was overwhelming to navigate trying to understand the full spectrum of our user's interactions across different listening devices.
My goal became to craft user personas that reflected our audience’s diversity, combining behavioural data and user feedback. I wanted to be able to use this to influence how we approach engagement campaigns while ensuring privacy for the users.
Process and Collaboration
1. Hypothesis and Synthesizing Stage
Ultimately, I needed to determine what I was going to test against. I started with our content types and synthesizing user personas, goals, motivations and challenges using what I did know from our user feedback to define potential use cases.
2. Initial Data Analysis
The next step was to dive into a detailed analysis of user interactions across the app. This revealed distinct patterns in listening preferences and behaviours. Our data was vast and complex, which required a thorough, strategic approach - one beyond my capabilities.
3. Collaboration with Data Analyst
Fortunately, I was able to collaborate closely with our Data Analyst, who was simultaneously working on clustering users based on their habits to identify at risk users and improve retention. We found that our initial hypotheses about user personas aligned closely with the patterns emerging from the data, which was exciting and validated our approach.
Persona Development
From our analysis and collaboration, we defined four key user personas:
Talk Show Fanatic
Music Show Enthusiast
Casual Listener
Data-Driven Emerging Persona (based on user clustering)
4. Survey Execution and Validation
To ensure accuracy, I designed a survey to validate these personas, offering deeper insights into user goals, motivations, and challenges. This survey provided us with the necessary validation to move forward confidently.
Insights & Validation
The survey not only confirmed that our personas resonated with users but also provided detailed feedback that helped refine our approach.
Persona Validation
Users strongly identified with the personas we developed, affirming accurate segmentation.
Goals and Motivations
Users’ primary motivations included staying informed, discovering new music, and enjoying high-quality listening experiences.Challenges
Common frustrations included difficulty in finding specific content and managing app usage with daily responsibilities.User Satisfaction
While overall satisfaction was positive, feedback pinpointed areas for improvement, particularly around content discoverability and stability.
Participant Feedback & Reflections
Participants provided overall satisfaction ratings for the Global Player app, which was overwhelmingly positive, averaging at 4.16 out of 5.
While the majority rated their experience positively, there were areas where improvements were suggested. This feedback emphasises the ease of use, intuitive design, quick scrubbing functionality to make a more pleasnt listening experience.
Here are the 4 key areas of improvement suggested by participants:
Improve App Stability
Faster Load Time
A Universal Search
Implement Dark Mode
Impact and Recommendations
Based on the insights and persona validation, we have since been able to move forward with several app improvements:
Universal Search Feature:
Enhanced content discoverability to address a major pain point for users.App Stability Improvements:
Focused on ensuring a seamless user experience, even during high-traffic times.User Interface Enhancements:
Updated the navigation to make it more intuitive and user-friendly.
Another major impact of my research was creating a meaningful starting point that allowed our product team to connect more deeply with our users. Through the development of these personas, our team was able to leverage them not just as user profiles, but as key resources to inform decisions on product strategy, customer experience, and UX copy.
The four personas that emerged from my research have become essential tools, now consistently used to kick off the discovery process for all new Global Player features. While the lives of these personas are ever-evolving, naturally aligning with changes in human behaviour and shifting technology trends, they continue to stand strong, behaving consistently across our diverse user base.
These four personas now form the backbone of our user-focused strategy, guiding the design and development of Global Player in a way that keeps us deeply attuned to the needs of our audience.
Conclusion & Retrospective
The creation of data-driven user personas has significantly advanced Global Player’s approach to user experience. By focusing on the needs and behaviours of specific user segments, we’re now better equipped to deliver a more engaging and personalised app experience. Moving forward, our plan is to continuously refine these personas, incorporating ongoing user feedback to ensure Global Player remains at the forefront of the digital audio industry.
What Went Well 😊
The collaboration with the Data Analyst was key to ensuring our personas were grounded in actual user behaviour and data. By merging analytics and user feedback, we created a set of personas that accurately represented our user base and informed key design decisions. The validation process was smooth, and the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive, with clear next steps for improving the app.
What Could’ve Been Better 😕
Navigating the massive dataset in the beginning was overwhelming, and initial progress was slower than anticipated. While the collaboration with the Data Analyst helped immensely, a more streamlined data collection and analysis process could have allowed us to reach conclusions faster.
Key Takeaways
This project highlighted the power of data-driven user insights in shaping product development. Combining analytics with user feedback allowed us to create personas that not only improved the user experience but also increased user engagement. Additionally, it reinforced the value of continuous iteration—personas are never “finished,” and ongoing refinement is essential to meet evolving user needs.