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 snapshot that is taken out of context.
But strangely enough, manufacturers use personalities to encourage their style for the real world.
A step up, identities
Most manufacturers have at least once in their careers created, used, or encountered identities. 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 consist of a name, profile picture, quotes, demographics, goals, needs, behavior in relation to a particular service/product, emotions, and motivations ( for example, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster ). According to design firm Designit, the goal of personas is” to make the research relatable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”
The decontextualization of personalities
People are well-known because they make “dry” research information relevant and more people. However, this approach places a cap on the author’s data analysis, making it impossible for the investigated users to be excluded from their particular contexts. As a result, personalities don’t describe important factors that make you realize 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 history knowledge to understand 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of features, despite the fact that many businesses still try to recruit and retain their employees and customers using outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ).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 change your mind about the choices 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 persons, your mood, and the whole history that led up to a situation.
Personas do not account for this variability in their attempt to simplify reality; instead, they present a user as a set of features. 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 natural flexibility. This behavior defies stereotypes, diminishes diversity, and doesn’t reflect reality.
Personas focus on individuals, not the environment
In the real world, you’re creating content for a situation, not an individual. 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, personas do not explicitly describe how the user interacts with the environment but rather show the user alone.
Would you always make the same decision over and over again? Possibly you’ve made a commitment to veganism but still want to buy 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 comprehend how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances given that you haven’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 purposeful purpose?
The validity of personas is deceiving.
To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. To combat this, designers create and add “relatable” details to personas to make them appear to be real people. Nothing better captures 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. Wouldn’t it be much more responsible to emphasize that John is only an abstraction while deliberately obscuring the fact that” John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings? Let’s say something is artificial, and let’s say it’s that.
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. As with everything they produce, they do so by introducing a lot of biases. As Designit suggests, as designers, we can” contextualize]the persona” based on our experience and reality. We create connections that are familiar to us“. With each new detail added, this practice furthers stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and takes people’s actual reality even further.
To conduct effective design research, we must report the actual situation and make it relatable for our audience, so that everyone can use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response.
Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas
What should we do instead of using 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 a part of a system that controls their behavior, personality, and mindset. Therefore, Mindsets are also not absolute but change in regard to the situation. What determines a certain Mindset, is the question still unanswered.
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, offers another alternative. For example, a visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Because they are based on the idea that the context is the pattern, not the personality ,ersona spectrums are very 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 viewed 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 about reality can be more relatable and inspiring. 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]? ]” You don’t need to, which is the simple answer. You don’t need to know a lot about everyone to have deep and meaningful insights.
In qualitative research, validity does not derive from quantity but from accurate sampling. You choose the individuals who best fit the “population” you’re designing for. You can infer how the rest of the population thinks and acts if this sample is chosen wisely and you have a deep understanding of the sampled people. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys, one of each will do.
In the same way, you don’t need to comprehend Susan in fifteen different ways. Once you’ve seen her in a few different settings, you’ve come to understand how Susan responds to various circumstances. 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 should be represented as an individual because each is already an abstraction of a larger group of individuals in similar circumstances because each person is representative of a portion of the total population you’re researching. You don’t want to see abstracts of them! 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 remains: how do you select 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 therefore recruited by enticing people to explain why and how they obtained a smart thermostat. 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. This will give you more examples and anecdotes to enrich your qualitative data. 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. With the additions or corrections made by wives, husbands, children, or occasionally even pets, each interviewee would tell a story that would then become much more engaging and precise. 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, broad research areas with broad questions are typically best defined. 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,” My wife doesn’t have the thermostat’s app installed; she uses WhatsApp instead,” when we asked how his family controlled the temperature in the house. 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 serve as examples of the larger picture. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. The important demographics were family type, number and type of houses owned, economic status, and technological maturity in our case 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. Photos of the setting and anonymized actors are necessary to create realistic Selves in the case of real-life ethnographic research. 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 how he used to spend weekends with his family in his mountain home. We depicted him hiking with his young daughter as a result.
At the end of the research analysis, we displayed all of the Selves ‘” cards” on a single canvas, categorized by activities. Each card featured a situation, which was indicated by a quote and a distinctive image. Each participant had several cards about themselves.
4. Identify creative uses
You will start to notice patterns once you have taken all of the main quotes from the interview transcripts and diaries and written them down as self-cards. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.
There was a particularly intriguing insight around the concept of humidity in our example project. 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
People are surrounded by changing environments, peculiar situations that people face, and the actions that follow when using the Dynamic Selves approach for research. 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 are wealthy or poor, who are tech enthusiasts and have families or are single. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.
Once you have fully grasped the underlying causes of Davide’s behavior and have understood them in detail, you can then generalize how he would act in a different 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 about people and how difficult it is to feel empathy for others. 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. Simply put, this is how they are in real life. 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 important benefit of Dynamic Selves is that it raises the stakes of your work: someone you and the team know and have met will experience the consequences if you violate your design. 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. To obtain this result, it is crucial to document real research. 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 afraid that if we choose to use this functionality, we’ll add complexity to her life.
Conclusion
In their article on Mindsets, Designit mentioned that “design thinking tools provide 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 environments.
Design needs to be simplified, but not to be a generalization. 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 to characterize the person in all of their contexts, and portray them. People and insights both come with 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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