From Segments to Stories:
Upskill User Persona

Upskill had invested heavily in creating self-paced learning experiences. The content was high-quality. The platform was functional. And yet—many users weren’t sticking around to finish what they started. This question arises from the realization that we still lack a proper guide to understanding Upskill users. That’s when I joined forces with our Product Analyst, Denidya Adi Nugroho, to look deeper. The Product Analyst began by crunching numbers, conducting an RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis to categorize learners based on how recently they engaged, how often, and how much they spent. This segmentation helped us identify key user groups with distinct behaviors.

They were valuable segments—but they didn’t tell us why users behaved the way they did.
Here’s where I came in.

It started with a question:
Why aren’t student completing their courses?

My Approach

To dive deeper beyond the numbers, I designed a mix-method qualitative study:

• Stakeholder and internal Interview to gather current business assumptions and align research direction.

• In-depth Interviews with 12 participants across key RFM segments.

• Digital Ethnography and user profiling to observe contextual habits and learning environments.

• Affinity Mapping & Thematic Analysis to synthesize insights from interviews and behavioral patterns.

• Persona & Customer Journey Mapping to visualize pain points and motivation triggers along the user path.

Research Impact

• Produce User Persona and Customer Journey Map as product development guideline

• My work helped bridge quantitative segmentation with qualitative understanding.

• It informed strategic discussions around engagement design, including ideas related to user motivation, product framing, and learning progress.

• The research contributed to the ideation and refinement of a new feature concept, aiming to improve learner engagement in a non-intrusive and learner-centric way

One of these research findings and recommendation helped spark a key design direction: Gamification.

Led by Product Manager Andreas Wijaya, the team from Product and Tech division developed a Skill Badge system—a visual way for learners to track and showcase their progress. This small change shifted the narrative from “finish your course” to “build your skill story”. Early feedback from adopters pointed to stronger motivation and higher engagement—Read more about Andreas’s product story here.

I began my UX Research career by contributing as intern to assist the creation of the first user persona at Niagahoster in 2020.
At Cakap, I also led the development of the initial user personas and produced nearly all personas used by the product team to understand our users. Among all, the Upskill User Persona project stands out as one of my favorites—thanks to its complexity and the collaborative process that made the work especially meaningful by translating complexity into clarity and data into empathy.

*Notes: Images might look a bit fuzzy or small—and that’s me playing it safe with NDAs.
I'm happy to walk you through the full story if it's for a job opportunity.