Creating Dealer Personas &
Retailer Segmentation
BACKGROUND
The Climate Corporation has several Agtech products that help enable farmers to make more confident and informed decisions about their farm. We have predominately focused on one type of user — the farmer. Much of the current feature-functionality within our products is geared towards owner-operator farmers who own the operation as well as handle the day-to-day out in the field.
After releasing numerous features and building up a user base, we realized that we were missing an integral component of farming: relationships. Most farmers have strong relationships with their dealers (the people who sell them seed and chemicals) which meant that we were leaving out a critical part of the equation.
This initiative to better understand both Dealers and Retailers stemmed from the organization’s realization that we had no shared foundational understanding of these roles.
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TEAM
I worked closely with a Senior User Researcher through all stages of the process from interviewing dealers and other stakeholders to synthesizing information to create the dealer personas and retailer segment documentation.
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ROLE
User Research, User Testing, Sketching, Wireframing, and Document Generation.
Process
I’ll briefly summarize the process we went through to create and vet these pieces of documentation. Unfortunately, these documents are intended for internal use only and so I am unable share any specific details.
Generate Discussion Guide to gather relevant data points.
Interview 40 dealers with a mixture of behavioral and attitudinal questions.
Synthesize learnings to start creating attitudinal buckets.
Sketch and wireframe various document layouts to decide on which variations properly displayed information purposefully.
Create high-fidelity documents with all relevant data points.
Test the accuracy of the personas with relevant stakeholders like Climate Business Managers and Product Managers.
Synthesize feedback, iterate, and generate a set of Secondary Personas.
Primary and Secondary Persona documents generated and well vetted!
Persona Components
We asked ourselves:
“Which nuggets of information would create a well-rounded understanding of the attitudinal profiles of dealers?”
Tech Adoption life cycle
A sociological model that can help predict the potential adoption of a particular product based on which group a user belongs to.
CURRENT TOOLKIT
A snapshot of what other tools dealers are using to manage customers and complete tasks. Indirectly identifies areas in which our current product is failing to close the loop.
DEALER ATTRIBUTES
These character attributes help paint a clear picture of the dealer’s underlying mentalities and how it connects to their approach to work.
dealer Stressors
Understanding which stressors affect specific groups of dealers is vital to creating a user-centric product that serves a valuable purpose.
wishlist
Obtaining feedback from dealers is usually difficult because they work long hours all year, so capturing these requests is important for future feature-functionality.
motivators
Capturing motivators allow us to identify their values — which is conducive to building a purposeful and valued product.
Activity Timeline
Reproducing a summarized season timeline allows us to form connections as to which types of activities are prioritized by different dealer personas.
device usage
Understanding the distribution of device usage for dealers along with the respective activities is necessary for us to support a purposeful device strategy.
Key Takeaways
Creating the dealer personas was an intense project! Generating company-wide documents like these cannot be done in isolation — numerous departments need to be involved and everyone needs to be on the same page.
The documentation that came out of this project will have a definite impact on the product moving forward. Additionally, these serve as an educational tool to help colleagues gain a baseline understanding of dealers and retailers.
During this project, I noticed that there wasn’t a unified definition of what a “persona” was, which makes it difficult to use that term. I consider personas as the “attitudinal profiles” within one user role. I believe that persona documents are great assets to help gain a baseline understanding of user attitudes and should be used as guidance only — not followed to a T.