Case study

Estée Lauder Personas

In this case study, we will be exploring Personas I create while at Estée Lauder Companies. Upon starting at ELC, as part of a growing team, I noticed there were a lot of assumptions being made about our Users based on legacy knowledge. I wanted to get this knowledge 'down on paper.'

I interviewed 42 users about their experience shopping on DTC for Estée Lauder, as well as other luxury brands.

Looking for a designer to help bring your vision to life? I would love to hear from you. Currently taking on new website design and brand projects from August 2023.

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Process

Methodology for Personas

Challenge:

We want know our customer & empathize with them.
We want to know who is our key customer and what are their goals when they shop online and in store.
Key Objective 1: 2 user personas & 1 negative buyer persona
Key Objective 2: A guide to creating personas for other ELC brands

Results: 40+ interviews, 2 field studies and 40 surveys completed
Results: 2-3 customer personas created including collaboration and verification from key stakeholders and SMEs.

Foundations for Personas

Successfully turn user data into user interfaces. Learn how to create, maintain and utilize personas throughout the UX design process.

Understanding your users is the core principle in user-centered design. But how do you get from knowing about users to actively creating an excellent user experience? Utilizing user personas as a design tool can help you accomplish just that.

User personas are fictitious yet realistic representations of your target users. They act as a multipurpose tool used to drive many important product development tasks such as: the creation of user scenarios, feature generation, and feature prioritization. Created out of complex user data, personas take on a format that is meaningful and creates user empathy among your development team, ensuring your users are always the focus of your efforts.

In this course you will learn methods for developing effective qualitative user personas as well as time-tested techniques for embedding them into your design process to aid in decision-making and inspire creativity along the way. You will leave with a full understanding of why personas work, and the skills needed to bring them to life and utilize them effectively within your own organization and existing methodologies. From https://www.nngroup.com/

Outcome

The final outcome of the Persona creation for Estée Lauder was three personas including a negative buyer's persona. As often is the case, the stakeholders and other designers found the negative buyer persona very interesting. It's always a great conversation to talk about why people won't purchase from your brand. And which of these reasons as challenges worthy of tackling according to designers, stakeholders and executives?

Persona deck can be found here including links to video interviews