The role of archetypes in enterprise user experience (EUX)

What is an Archetype?

Archetypes are behavioral perspectives of users towards a specific product. They contain details from user interviews around a group’s needs, motivations and pain-points. Archetypes most directly help determine the approach and functionality of a product’s experience, as well as contributing to determining, validating, and prioritizing product features.

Archetypes help you discover behavioral patterns to predict how a user will behave. Well-designed archetype research will use a combination of persona and archetype information to find real customers that match the persona characteristics and the expected behavior of the archetype to ensure the predicted behavioral patterns are accurate. While user behavior may always change and archetypes should be adjusted as such, this thorough level of research allows for an accurately designed product from the beginning, creating a nearly flawless user experience for your customers.

How are they different from personas?

Personas are often utilized in broader marketing strategy, archetypes differ and are a more accurate way to inform your UX. Personas are fictionalized and hypothetical characters that represent segments of your user base and are built around demographic details such as age, occupation, education, and more, but leave out a key aspect: behaviors. Additionally, personas are often discovered as a by-product rather than being the starting point of a project, and you risk altering your persona to validate inaccurate design decisions.

Why does an Enterprise Application need Archetypes?

A major differentiating factor for EUX users is that that is not our direct clients. People who decide the purchase decisions will not use our products and how they want to manage it will always depend upon the size of your client company.

For Example, a payroll application has a defined set of personas like payroll practitioner, payroll accountant, payroll supervisor, and payroll manager. This will work well while designing for medium to large client organizations. But, for small business segments, there will be only one person to manage all the tasks related to payroll or Tax. In such scenarios where will we place these user? for which persona will you design?

As archetypes focus on the “who does, what, when they do it, and why” of your users, they will provide insight into their behavior patterns like how they are using your product or service currently. Some users can also fall into multiple archetypes throughout the journey, depending on their goals and organization roles.

So, when you design for behaviors they become more relatable for your users than to their roles. As you combine your personas and archetypes, you will be able to serve the needs of all user groups regardless of Large/medium/small business segments.

General behavioral parameters of EUX include:

• TASK PRIORITIES — Focus on process completion To Focus on Process Improvement
• TASK RESPONSIBILITIES — Technical worker Vs Decision Maker
• WORK STYLE Reactive Vs Proactive
• ENSURING THE DATA ACCURACY — Synchronizing data in systems Vs approving the data
• APPROACH TO TASK EXECUTION — Focusing on speed Vs focusing on accuracy
• ACTIVITIES AROUND DATA — Analyzing for research Vs analyzing for strategic reasons
• MANUAL DATA ENTRY — Infrequently Vs frequently
• WORK STATUS FLOW — Tracking progress Vs updated on progress
• INFORMATION FLOW BETWEEN THE SYSTEMS, PEOPLE, INTERNAL, EXTERNAL — Distributing information Vs requesting information
• ARCHIVING ACTIVITIES — Irregularly Vs regularly
• TOOLS, PROCESS AND, CULTURE
• DRIVERS — Deadline drove Vs long-term vision

So when is the best time to use archetypes? Honestly? All the time! Your archetypes should be front and center in your company or team. Your teams should be able to rattle them off like their ABCs. When taking a human-centered approach to design and development, it’s important to keep the user groups front and center. This way you know that you are truly creating a sound product or solution that fits your users’ needs. It is helpful to group users into archetypes so that you can think through how a certain feature, product, or campaign will be perceived by that archetype group.