We concur that computer-generated heads may be excellent candidates for personas, but not for the purpose you might think otherwise. Ironically, the website highlights the core issue of this very common design method: the person ( a ) does not exist. Personas are deliberately created, just like in the photos. Knowledge is combined into a sporadic, unreliable preview that is taken out of context.
But strangely enough, manufacturers use personalities to encourage their style for the real world.
Personas: A action up
Most manufacturers have at least once in their careers created, used, or encountered personalities. In their content” Personas- A Plain Introduction”, the Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your study in order to reflect the unique user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand”. Personas typically include a title, profile picture, rates, populations, goals, wants, behavior in relation to a particular service or product, feelings, and desires ( for instance, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster ). According to design firm Designit, the goal of personas is to “make the research relateable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”
The decontextualization of identities
People are well-known because they make “dry” study information relevant and more people. However, this approach places a cap on the author’s ability to exclude the target customers from their particular contexts. As a result, personalities don’t describe important factors that make you know their decision-making method or allow you to connect to users ‘ thoughts and behavior, they lack stories. You are aware of the persona’s actions, but you lack the knowledge to know why. You end up with less human-like user images.
This “decontextualization” we see in identities happens in four way, which we’ll discuss below.
People are assumed to be stable, according to individuals.
Here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of features. Although many businesses still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ), You act, think, and feel different according to the situations you experience. You may work pleasant to some people, or you might act rude to others because you appear distinct to different people. And you constantly refute the selections you’ve made.
Modern psychology agree that while persons usually behave according to certain styles, it’s actually a combination of history and culture that determines how people act and take decisions. The context determines the kind of person you are at each particular time, including the environment, the effect of other people, your mood, and the whole story that led up to a situation.
Personas present a user as a fixed set of features in an effort to simplify reality, but do so without taking this variability into account. Like personality tests, personas snatch people away from real life. Even worse, people are labeled as” that kind of person” with no means to exercise their innate flexibility and are reduced to a label. This behavior defies stereotypes, diminishes diversity, and doesn’t reflect reality.
Personas focus on individuals, not the environment
You’re designing for a context, not an individual, in the real world. There are environmental, political, and social factors to consider when a person lives in a family, a community, or an ecosystem. A design is never meant for a single user. Instead, you create a product that is intended to be used by a certain number of people. However, personal experiences don’t explicitly describe how a user feels about the environment. Instead, they show the user only.
Would you always make the same decision over and over again? Despite your pledge to eat vegan, you may still choose to purchase some meat when your relatives visit. Your decisions, including your behavior, opinions, and statements, are not only completely accurate but highly contextual because they vary with various circumstances and variables. The persona that “represents” you wouldn’t take into account this dependency, because it doesn’t specify the premises of your decisions. It doesn’t offer a justification for why you act in the way you do. People practice the well-known attribution error, which states that they too often attribute others ‘ behavior to their personalities and not to the circumstances.
As mentioned by the Interaction Design Foundation, personas are usually placed in a scenario that’s a” specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve “—does that mean context actually is considered? Unfortunately, what frequently occurs is that you choose a fictional character to play with a particular circumstance based on the fiction. How could you possibly understand how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances if you hadn’t even fully investigated and understood the current context of the people you want to represent?
Personas are meaningless averages
A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real person, as stated in Shlomo Goltz’s introduction article on Smashing Magazine; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people. The famous example of the USA Air Force designing planes based on the average of 140 of their pilots ‘ physical dimensions and not a single pilot actually fit within that average seat is a well-known criticism of this aspect of personas.
The same limitation applies to mental aspects of people. Have you ever heard a famous person say something was taken out of context? They uttered my words, but I didn’t mean it that way. The celebrity’s statement was reported literally, but the reporter failed to explain the context around the statement and didn’t describe the non-verbal expressions. In the end, the intended meaning was lost. You do the same when you create personas: you collect someone’s statement ( or goal, or need, or emotion ), whose meaning can only be understood if you give its own particular context, and then report it as an isolated finding.
But personas go a step further, extracting a decontextualized finding and joining it with another decontextualized finding from somebody else. The resultant set of findings frequently does not make sense because it is unclear or even contradictory because it lacks the underlying causes for and how that finding came about. It lacks any significance. And the persona doesn’t give you the full background of the person ( s ) to uncover this meaning: you would need to dive into the raw data for each single persona item to find it. What then is the persona’s usefulness?
The validity of personas can be deceiving.
To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. Designers create “relatable” personas to make them appear like real people in order to overcome this. Nothing better explains the absurdity of this than a phrase from the Interaction Design Foundation,” Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.” In other words, you add non-realism in an attempt to create more realism. You purposefully understate the fact that” John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings, but wouldn’t it be much more responsible to emphasize that John is only an abstraction? Let’s say something is artificial, and let’s say it is.
It’s the finishing touch of a persona’s decontextualization: after having assumed that people’s personalities are fixed, dismissed the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers invent new context to create ( their own ) meaning. They do so by introducing a number of biases, as with everything they create. As designers, as Designit puts it, we can” contextualize]the persona” based on our experience and reality. We create connections that are familiar to us“. With every new detail added, this practice furthers stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality.
Everyone should use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response if we want to conduct good design research by reporting the reality “as-is” and making it relatable for our audience.
Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas
What should we do instead if we shouldn’t use personas?
Designit suggests using mindsets rather than personas. Each Mindset is a” spectrum of attitudes and emotional responses that different people have within the same context or life experience”. It challenges designers to avoid becoming fixated on just one person’s way of life. Unfortunately, despite being a step in the right direction, this proposal disregards the fact that people are influenced by how their personality, behavior, and, yes, mindset are shaped by their surroundings. Therefore, Mindsets are also not absolute but change in regard to the situation. What determines a particular Mindset, remains to be seen.
Another option is provided by Margaret P., the author of the article” Kill Your Personas,” who has argued for replacing personas with persona spectrums that include a range of user abilities. For example, a visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Because they recognize that the context is the pattern, not the personality, Persona spectrums are extremely useful for more inclusive and context-based design. However, their only drawback is that they have a very functional perspective on users that misses the relatability of a real person taken from within a spectrum.
In developing an alternative to personas, we aim to transform the standard design process to be context-based. Similar to how we previously dealt with people, contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify. So how do we learn these patterns? How do we ensure truly context-based design?
Understand real people in a variety of contexts
Nothing can be more relatable and inspiring than reality. Therefore, we have to understand real individuals in their multi-faceted contexts, and use this understanding to fuel our design. We refer to this method as Dynamic Selves.
Let’s take a look at how the approach looks based on an illustration from a recent study that examined Italians ‘ habits around energy consumption. We drafted a design research plan aimed at investigating people’s attitudes toward energy consumption and sustainable behavior, with a focus on smart thermostats.
1. Select the appropriate sample.
When we argue against personas, we’re often challenged with quotes such as” Where are you going to find a single person that encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced personas]? ]” The simple answer is that you are not required to. Your insights need not be extensive and meaningful, as you don’t need to know much about everyone.
In qualitative research, validity does not derive from quantity but from accurate sampling. You pick the people who best fit the “population” you’re designing for. If this sample is chosen wisely and you have a deep understanding of the sampled people, you can infer how the rest of the population thinks and acts. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys, one of each will do.
In fifteen different situations, Susan is not necessary. Once you’ve seen her in a few different settings, you’ve grasped Susan’s general scheme of action. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.
It becomes clear why each person should be portrayed as an individual because each already represents an abstraction of a larger group of people in similar circumstances because each person is representative of a portion of the population you’re researching. You don’t want to see abstractions of abstractions! These selected people need to be understood and shown in their full expression, remaining in their microcosmos—and if you want to identify patterns you can focus on identifying patterns in contexts.
However, the question persists: how do you choose a sample representative? First, you must consider the target market for the product or service you are designing. It might be helpful to examine the company’s objectives and strategy, the current customer base, and/or a potential future target audience.
In our example project, we were designing an application for those who own a smart thermostat. Everyone in their home could have a smart thermostat in the future. However, only early adopters currently own one. To build a significant sample, we needed to understand the reason why these early adopters became such. We then recruited by enticing customers to explain their needs and sources of purchase. There were those who had made the decision to purchase it, those who had been influenced by others to do so, and those who had located it in their homes. So we selected representatives of these three situations, from different age groups and geographical locations, with an equal balance of tech savvy and non-tech savvy participants.
2. Conduct your research
After having chosen and recruited your sample, conduct your research using ethnographic methodologies. Your qualitative data will be enriched with examples and anecdotes thanks to this. Given COVID-19 restrictions, we turned an internal ethnographic research project into home-based remote family interviews that were followed by diary research in our example project.
To gain an in-depth understanding of attitudes and decision-making trade-offs, the research focus was not limited to the interviewee alone but deliberately included the whole family. Each interviewee would provide a story that would later become much more interesting and precise with the additions made by their spouses, partners, kids, or occasionally even pets. We also paid attention to the behaviors that came from having relationships with other meaningful people ( such as coworkers or distant relatives ) and the relationships that came from those relationships. This wide research focus allowed us to shape a vivid mental image of dynamic situations with multiple actors.
It’s crucial that the research’s scope remain broad enough to cover all potential actors. Therefore, it typically works best to define broad research areas with broad questions. Interviews are best set up in a semi-structured way, where follow-up questions will dive into topics mentioned spontaneously by the interviewee. The most insightful findings will be made with this open-minded “plan to be surprised.” One of our participants responded to our question about how his family controlled the house temperature by saying,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app; she uses WhatsApp instead. If she wants to turn on the heater and she is not home, she will text me. I serve as her thermostat.
3. Analysis: Create the Dynamic Selves
You begin to represent each individual with several Dynamic Selves, each” Self” representing one of the circumstances you have examined throughout the research analysis. A quote serves as the foundation of each Dynamic Self, which is supported by a photo and a few relevant demographics that help to illustrate the larger context. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. In our case, the important demographics were family type, number and type of houses owned, economic status, and technological maturity because our research focused on families and their way of life to understand their needs for thermal regulation. To facilitate the stakeholders ‘ transition from personas and be able to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person, we also included the individual’s name and age, but they are optional.
To capture exact quotes, interviews need to be video-recorded and notes need to be taken verbatim as much as possible. This is crucial to ensuring that each participant’s various selves are truthful. To create authentic selves in ethnographic research using real-world actors and photos of the setting are necessary. Ideally, these photos should come directly from field research, but an evocative and representative image will work, too, as long as it’s realistic and depicts meaningful actions that you associate with your participants. One of our interviewees, for instance, shared a story of his mountain home where he used to spend weekends with his family. Therefore, we depicted him taking a hike with his young daughter.
At the end of the research analysis, we displayed all of the Selves ‘” cards” on a single canvas, categorized by activities. A quote and a unique photo were displayed on each card, each illustrating a situation. Each participant had several cards about themselves.
4. Identify potential designs
You’ll start to notice patterns when you’ve written down all of the key phrases from the interview transcripts and diaries as self-cards. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.
A particularly intriguing finding was made in our example project regarding the concept of humidity. We became aware of the importance of monitoring humidity for health and that people don’t know what it is because an environment that’s too dry or wet can cause respiratory problems or worsen already existing ones. This highlighted a big opportunity for our client to educate users on this concept and become a health advisor.
Benefits of Dynamic Selves
When you conduct your research using the Dynamic Selves method, you start to notice peculiar social relations, peculiar circumstances that people face, and the consequences of their actions, as well as the fact that people are surrounded by constantly changing environments. In our thermostat project, we have come to know one of the participants, Davide, as a boyfriend, dog-lover, and tech enthusiast.
Davide is a person we might have once consigned to the persona of a “tech enthusiast.” However, there are also those who love technology who have families or are single, who are wealthy or poor. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.
You can generalize how he would act in a different situation once you have understood Davide in more detail and have fully understood the underlying causes of his behavior for each circumstance. You can infer what he would think and do in the circumstances ( or scenarios ) you design for using your understanding of him.
The Dynamic Selves approach aims to dismiss the conflicted dual purpose of personas—to summarize and empathize at the same time—by separating your research summary from the people you’re seeking to empathize with. This is crucial because scale affects how we feel empathy for people and how difficult it is to do so with other people. We have the deepest sympathy for people who are able to relate to us.
If you take a real person as inspiration for your design, you no longer need to create an artificial character. No more developing plot devices to “realize” the character, and no more need for additional bias. This is exactly how this person lives out. In fact, in our experience, personas quickly become nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens, as we all know that these characters don’t really exist.
Another significant benefit of Dynamic Selves is that it raises the stakes of your work: if you ruin your design, someone you and the team know and have met will suffer the consequences. It might prompt you to perform daily design checks and may prevent you from taking shortcuts.
And finally, real people in their specific contexts are a better basis for anecdotal storytelling and therefore are more effective in persuasion. Real research documentation is necessary to obtain this result. It reinforces your design arguments by adding more weight and urgency:” When I met Alessandra, the conditions of her workplace struck me. Noise, bad ergonomics, lack of light, you name it. I’m worried that her life will become more complicated if we choose to use this functionality.
Conclusion
Designit stated in their article on Mindsets that “design thinking tools offer a shortcut to deal with reality’s complexities, but this process of simplification can occasionally flatten out people’s lives into a few general characteristics.” Unfortunately, personas have been culprits in a crime of oversimplification. They fail to account for the complex nature of our users ‘ decision-making processes and don’t take into account the fact that people are immersed in contexts.
Design needs to be simplified, not necessarily generalized. You have to look at the research elements that stand out: the sentences that captured your attention, the images that struck you, the sounds that linger. Use those as metaphors for the person in all of their contexts. People and insights are subject to a context, but they cannot be removed because it would detract from the context’s meaning.
It’s high time for design to move away from fiction, and embrace reality—in its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty—as our guide and inspiration.
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