Amazon Internship

Building an understanding of our users from the ground up

Challenge: Create business personas for the Amazon Business-to-Business retail team.

My role: I negotiated the scope of the project with stakeholders, designed the research study, recruited participants, executed the research study, and then analyzed/presented results, including designing personas. My deliverables included a research report, three personas, a mental model, and a final presentation.

Process: While the task began as "create business personas", I quickly worked with stakeholders to determine the scope of my summer internship to focus on midsize businesses. My research methodology included contextual inquiry, in-person interviews and phone interviews. Once I collected all the data, it was synthesized into high-level findings about the needs of employees purchasing for their company and also high-level findings for their needs and current use-cases particular to Amazon.

Results: Some of my findings were not far from what was expected - for example, the roles that employees play with respect to the purchasing process closely aligned with those that were already being assumed. I was surprised to find there were two types of buyers - those for whom it was their entire job and had established processes for purchasing, and those who did it as a part of their job and often had even less of an understanding of the requirements for the purchase. A clear theme was that companies wanted everything to be integrated, so that they didn't need to manually enter information from one system to another.

Date: Summer 2014