We concur that personas could be excellent matches for computer-generated eyes, but not for the purpose you might think. 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 pictures. Knowledge is combined into an isolated preview that is detached from reality and taken out of the normal 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 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
Personalities are well-known because they make “dry” research information more realistic and 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 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 user images that are in reality less people.
This “decontextualization” we see in identities happens in four way, which we’ll discuss below.
People are assumed to be dynamic, according to people.
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of features, despite the fact that many businesses still try to recruit and retain their employees and customers using outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ).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 conditions you experience. You may work helpful 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 type of person you are in each particular moment depends on the context, the impact of other people, your mood, and the whole history that led to the situation.
Personas provide a consumer as a predetermined set of features in an effort to improve reality, but do so without taking this variability into account. Like character tests, personas seize people away from real life. Even worse, individuals are labeled as” that kind of guy” with no means to practice their innate flexibility and are reduced to a brand. This behavior discredits variety, perpetuates stereotypes, and doesn’t reveal reality.
Personas rely on people, not the environment
In the real world, you’re creating content for a situation, no an entity. There are economic, political, and social factors to consider when a man lives in a home, a community, or an ecosystem. A pattern is not meant for a single customer. Instead, you create a layout for one or more specific situations where a certain product might be used by a large number of people. However, personal experiences don’t explicitly explain how a person feels about the surroundings. Instead, they show the user only.
Do you generally make the same decision over and over again? Possibly you’ve made a commitment to veganism but still want to get some meat when your family visit. Your decisions, including your behavior, opinions, and statements, are not absolute but greatly contextual because they depend on various circumstances and factors. The image that “represents” you wouldn’t take into account this interdependence, because it doesn’t explain the grounds of your choices. It doesn’t give a rationale for your behavior. 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, identities are often placed in a situation that’s a” specific environment with a problem they want to or have to solve “—does that mean environment actually is considered? Unfortunately, it’s common to pick a fictional character and build a character’s behavior around 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 in Shlomo Goltz’s introduction to Smashing Magazine, according to Shlomo Goltz’s introduction article. It is instead made up of observations from numerous people. The famous USA Air Force design planes were designed based on the average of 140 of their pilots ‘ physical dimensions, with 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? I didn’t mean it that way when they used my words. 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. The intended purpose was lost as a result. You collect someone’s statement ( or goal, need, or emotion ) into which its meaning can only be understood if it is provided with its own specific 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 can be 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 explains the absurdity of this than the Interaction Design Foundation’s phrase,” 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 if you purposefully conceal the fact that” John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings? 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. 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 every new detail added, this practice furthers stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality.
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 suggested utilizing 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, remains to be seen.
Margaret P., the author of the article” Kill Your Personas,” who has argued for the use of persona spectrums that include a range of user abilities, offers an alternative. For example, a visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Persona spectrums are very helpful for more inclusive and context-based design because they are based on the understanding that the context is the pattern, not the personality. 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 tried to do this before with people, contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify. How do we find these patterns, then? 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. Dynamic Selves is how we define it.
Let’s take a look at how the approach looks based on an illustration of how one of us used it in 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 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 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 total population you’re researching. You oppose abstractions of abstraction! 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 representative sample? First of all, you must consider who the target market is 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 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. 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 important people ( such as coworkers or distant relatives ), as well as 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 scope of the study 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,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app; she uses WhatsApp instead,” when we asked how his family controlled the house temperature. 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 as a series of dynamic selves during the research analysis, each” Self” representing a particular context. 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 key demographics were family type, number and type of homes 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. The individuals ‘ names and ages are optional, but they were included to facilitate the stakeholders ‘ transition from personas and allow them to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person.
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’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 how a climate that is 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, and that people are surrounded by ever-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 are wealthy or poor who are tech enthusiasts, whether they are single or have families. 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 compassion for people with whom we can relate.
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 the Dynamic Selves approach 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. In order to obtain this result, documentation of real research is necessary. 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
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 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 to characterize the person in all of their contexts, and portray them. 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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