While traditional personas help identify and understand users, true innovation requires a deeper understanding of user needs, goals, and motivations. By applying the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework, we developed personas based on what users need to accomplish rather than their titles or roles. This approach focuses on desired outcomes instead of prescribed solutions, leading to more meaningful innovation and measurable results.
This user-centric approach delivers:
• Simplified user roles aligned with actual work patterns
• Personalized views that match user needs
• Customized workflows that enhance productivity
• Improved user satisfaction and adoption
The JTBD framework recognizes that:
• Jobs encompass functional, emotional, and social aspects
• Core user needs remain stable over time and transcend specific solutions
• Understanding the user's "job" is key to successful product development
• Focus on jobs enables more effective marketing and predictable innovation
• Users seek solutions that help them work more efficiently and effectively
Traditional persona development in clinical research software often relies on job titles. However, these titles can mean different things across organizations, leading to significant gaps in understanding user needs. While this approach is industry standard, moving towards a more nuanced, job-based framework requires careful change management and stakeholder alignment.
Working as part of a three-person "tiger team", we developed a comprehensive approach to redefine user personas. This involved:
• Creating initial persona hypotheses
• Conducting in-depth research and analysis
• Iteratively refining our understanding through user interviews
• Developing a framework for implementation
Through extensive interviews with internal experts and users, we identified seven distinct personas based on system interaction patterns:
• Participant: Study participants
• Clinical: Users managing participant interactions and safety
• Regulatory: Documentation and standards managers
• Responsible: Study outcome owners
• Manager: Study progress and timeline managers
• Reviewer: Safety and compliance verification specialists
• Leader: Portfolio-level oversight of study health and efficiency
To illustrate how we applied the JTBD framework, we created detailed persona cards for each type. The Regulatory persona card shown here demonstrates how we captured each persona's core description, motivations, problem statements, and key tasks, along with their position on the VIEW-er to DO-er spectrum. This structured approach ensures we understand not just what users do, but why they do it.
The Viewer to DO-er Spectrum
Our analysis revealed that user interaction patterns fall along a spectrum from Viewer to DO-er. This visualization shows how each persona maps onto this spectrum, providing crucial insights for designing role-appropriate interfaces and workflows.
On the Viewer end, we find Leaders and Reviewers who primarily need aggregated views and oversight capabilities. Moving toward the DO-er end are personas like Clinical and Regulatory users who actively input and manage data in the system. This spectrum helps inform:
• Interface design priorities for each role
• Default dashboard configurations
• Navigation patterns and workflow optimization
• Access level requirements
• Feature prominence and availability
To simplify the complex landscape of clinical research organizations, we developed four distinct categories based on their primary functions and needs. This classification system moves beyond traditional industry labels to focus on how organizations actually operate within the clinical research ecosystem.
Rather than maintaining separate workflows for dozens of organization types, this streamlined categorization enables us to create flexible, purpose-built experiences while maintaining consistent core functionality:
• Managing: Organizations that sponsor and oversee studies
• Hybrid: Organizations that both manage their own studies and participate in others' research
• Doing: Organizations focused on study execution and participant interaction
• Vendor: Support organizations and channel partners
The image illustrates how traditional organization types map to these functional categories, demonstrating how seemingly different organizations often have similar fundamental needs and workflows.
Our final result was concept examples combining both personas and organization types. While we didn't represent every possible combination, the example dashboard shows a regulatory coordinator at a hybrid organization. Livia has eight studies saved to her landing page and can easily access study tasks, recent documents, or other information that may be important to the study according to its current phase.
These personas were developed as part of the new site enablement platform, but they can be implemented by the product and product design teams immediately.
During the requirements and concept design process, each persona or organization should be considered, why, when, and how they will be affected by the feature. Personas can be explored through user journeys, flow diagrams, and storyboards to understand and validate needs.
