Wayfair Professional: Contractor Personas

The Challenge: As a business, Wayfair Professional has little insight into their users and their industry-specific needs.

Solving for: The Wayfair Professional business, with the goal of eventually solving for contractors.

Role: Product designer working with product design manager, in collaboration with customer insights, content strategy, category management, product management, marketing creative

This contractor persona initiative is part of the larger effort on behalf of the business to better understand our customers, starting with contractors as they represented the largest market opportunity. The consumer insights team completed a several month-long series of qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys to better understand the contractor segment, which can be found below. The product design team gave input throughout this process on which questions would be important to ask and took part in weekly update meetings for the initiative.

Once the data was collected, we took the data and began the consolidation process with a whiteboarding session.

After our whiteboarding session, I turned our sketched structure into mocked personas.

We went through several rounds of iterations as a product design team, also in collaboration with our content strategist. One thing we struggled with was how to represent the level of ownership each persona had over purchasing decisions. We also collected feedback from product design and category management throughout this process.

Our time with the personas was cut a little short, but with more time we would have also added more qualitative insights from recorded customer interviews.