Personas without people: designing for organisations as complex users

Theme: Systems thinking

User-centred design traditionally focuses on individuals interacting with services. But in many public services, key decisions are not made by individuals alone - they emerge from organisational systems shaped by governance structures, shared strategy and distributed responsibilities.

In our work with multi-academy trusts, we found that treating a trust simply as a collection of individual users does not reflect how decisions actually happen. While individuals interact with services, priorities and actions often emerge at organisational level.

This session explores what happens when we treat organisations themselves as users. It introduces practical approaches for researching and designing for institutional actors, including system-level personas and techniques for understanding distributed decision-making across roles and teams.

Participant takeaways:

• recognise when the real user of a service is an organisation rather than an individual
• identify distributed decision-making across roles and teams
• create system-level personas representing institutional actors
• understand organisational mental models and priorities when designing services
• apply a system-centred perspective to services used by complex organisations