Cacoo, a Diagramming Tool: Personas

Background

Cacoo is Nulab’s diagramming tool. It’s utilized to make visuals like flowcharts, relational charts, and wireframes.

At the time of this project, Cacoo was a 10 year old product that was starting to show its age. Its aesthetics were dated and its interface was confusing and clunky.

At this time, stakeholders were looking to modernize and improve Cacoo in a major design overhaul.

 

Project Goals

This project followed Cacoo’s journey mapping study. Post-study discussions revolved around addressing the underserved needs and usability challenges that were discovered during that research.

In order to cement our foundational understanding of users, we decided to build personas, incorporating what we had learned from journey mapping.

Specifically our goals were to:

  • Create personas for the following phases containing underserved needs and usability challenges uncovered during journey mapping

    • Diagramming: Visualizing Ideas

    • Sharing & Presentation

    • Viewing & Collaboration

 

Reviewing Past Research

Since, data about users around basic background and behavior had already been collected during journey mapping research, the same data would be leveraged to create our initial personas.

In order start our Personas building process, the journey map phases below were reviewed to provide the main inspiration for Personas.

  • Diagramming: Visualizing Ideas

  • Sharing & Presentation

  • Viewing & Collaboration

 

Workshop

Once the journey map was reviewed, the team was split into 2 groups to build 2 personas.

The first persona would describe users during the “Diagramming: Visualizing Ideas” phase and “Sharing & Presentation” phase.

The second persona would describe users during the “Viewing & Collaboration” phase.

For each persona each team built a generalized profile that contained the following persona info:

  • Job role

  • Workplace

  • Software & Hardware utilized

  • Motivations

  • Goals

  • Behaviors

  • Quote

 

Personas

2 key personas were established, Diagram Creators and Diagram Viewers.

Diagram Creators

Diagram creators were those who focused on creating visualizations to share with their colleagues. Visualizations often represented business-related ideas, processes, and/or structures related to their work at hand.

Diagram Viewers

Diagram viewers were those who were more focused on “consuming” diagrams. Previously-created Diagrams were shared with them to aid business discussions and activities.

Summary & Deliverables

By the end of this project I was able to faciliate workshop that met our goals established at project start:

  • Create personas for the following phases containing underserved needs and usability challenges uncovered during journey mapping

  • Diagramming: Visualizing Ideas

  • Sharing & Presentation

  • Viewing & Collaboration

In terms of tangible deliverables the following was provided:

  • Low and high fidelity personas

Next Steps

This project was a key step in cementing our organizations understanding of who served. Creating these personas brought to life a specific type of person that the team could think about in moving forward with providing solutions.

After this project, these personas became the common language that the team referenced when building or improving upon Cacoo’s features.