Creating actionable patron personas for a library and archive.

ResearchDesign

Feb 5

In this case study

Summary

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) is a provincial institution with a three-fold mission. It is responsible for conserving the breadth of Quebec’s published works, archiving key cultural and historical private or legal documents, as well as serving as a public library for the residents of the province. In order to understand their diverse patronage, they had created a set of personas in 2018. Over the years the number of personas grew exponentially, but they were rarely used outside of the digital team. As a member of BAnQ’s Experience & Transformation Dept, myself and a colleague undertook the process of creating a more concretely usable set of patron representations.

Outcome

My role

I lead the project, determining the approach and defining the methodology. I collaborated with a junior designer to analyze previous research and do an initial synthesis, and to complete additional user research with patrons. My junior colleague analyzed the new data, and we collaborated on shaping the final deliverables.

We refined 16 personas into 8 personas using a Thinking Styles approach. We also created an internal toolkit to help employees understand how to use the new personas to develop new services or generate ideas for service improvements.

Needs definition

First we defined which teams at BAnQ would benefit from using the personas and in which contexts they might use them. We also highlighted challenges that currently prevented teams from using them.

Initial Analysis & Approach Definition

We reviewed the current personas to identify key dimensions and categorize information to identify trends across personas.

For the new personas, we chose to focus on patron behaviours, motivations and goals over sociodemographic characteristics (inspired by Indi Young’s Thinking Styles). We chose this approach to:

Reduce bias and stereotyping based on static traits (age, gender, social status, etc.)
Better reflect the changing, fluid nature of patron’s interactions with BAnQ services, based on their current needs, life stage etc.

Complementary Research

We dove into more recent consultant work that we felt might give us some insight into how patrons think and feel about services. We looked at:

Consultant research on the patron experience at the Grande Bibliothèque
Internal research on patron motivations and their appreciation of BAnQ as a whole
Internal research on patron use of BAnQ’s most popular digital platform
External research led by academics on the physical vs digital reading experiences and preferences of BAnQ patrons

First draft

We proposed an initial 8 personas based on the existing data with plans to further validate the links between various trends.

Validation & Testing

To validate the draft personas we identified through existing data we decided to rely on:

2000 survey responses from a recent patron survey, which we analyzed to see if mentioned behaviours and goals were linked together in a similar way as our draft personas
50 patron interviews (including people from under-researched groups) to gather additional qualitative data on their experience of the services

The new data seemed to support our initial ideas, but led to several tweaks, fusion of personas and addition of new personas.