We agree: the computer-generated eyes could be a great match for personas—but not for the function you might think. Ironically, the website highlights the core issue of this very common design method: the person ( a ) does not exist. Individuals are purposefully made, just like in the pictures. Data is taken out of natural surroundings and recombined into an isolated teaser that’s detached from reality.
But, curiously enough, people are characters who can be used as a source of inspiration for structures in the real world.
Personas: A activity up
Most companies have created, used, or come across characteristics at least once in their career. According to their content” Personas- A Simple Introduction,” the Interaction Design Foundation defines a page as “fictional figures that you create based upon your research to represent the various consumer forms that might use your company, product, website, or brand. In their most complete expression, personas typically consist of a name, profile picture, quotes, demographics, goals, needs, behavior in relation to a certain service/product, emotions, and motivations ( for example, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster ). The aim of personas is to “make the research relateable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development,” according to design firm Designit.
The decontextualization of characteristics
Personas are popular because they make “dry” research data more practical, more persons. However, this method limits the writer’s ability to interpret the data in a way that excludes the content from their specific contexts. As a result, characteristics don’t identify critical factors that make you understand their decision-making process or allow you to connect to people ‘ thoughts and behavior, they lack tales. You are aware of the character’s behavior, but you are unaware of why. You end up with representations of people that are actually less persons.
This “decontextualization” we see in names happens in four manner, which we’ll explain below.
People believe that people are fluid.
Although many companies still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ), here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of features. You decide how you act, feel, think, and action based on your feelings. You appear specific to different people, you may operate enjoyable to some, hard to others. And you change your mind all the time about options you’ve taken.
Current psychologists agree that how people act and make decisions ultimately depends on a combination of history and culture, despite the fact that people usually act in accordance with particular patterns. The context—the environment, the result of other people, your thoughts, the whole narrative that led up to a situation—determines the kind of person you are in each specific time.
In an effort to reduce fact, personas present a customer as a predetermined set of features, but do so without taking into account this variability. Like personality tests, personalities seize people away from real existence. Even worse, persons are reduced to a company and categorized as” that kind of person” with no means to discipline their natural freedom. This attitude reduces selection, reinforces stereotypes, and doesn’t show reality.
Personas rely on individuals, not the setting
In the real world, you’re writing content for a condition, not an object. Each individual lives in a group, a cluster, an wildlife, where there are environmental, social, and social factors you need to consider. A design is never meant for a single user. Otherwise, you create a product that is meant to appeal to a certain number of people. Personas, however, show the client alone rather than establish how the customer relates to the environment.
Do you constantly make the same choice? Maybe you’re a dedicated veggie but even decide to buy some meat when your household are coming across. As they depend on various circumstances and characteristics, your decisions—and habits, ideas, and comments —are no complete but exceedingly cultural. The persona that “represents” you doesn’t take into account this interdependence because it doesn’t explain the circumstances under which you make your decisions. It doesn’t provide a rationale of why you act the way you do. People practice the well-known attribution error, which states that too frequently they attribute behavior by others 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? However, what frequently happens is that you take a hypothetical character and based on that fiction decide how this character may deal with a particular situation. Given that you haven’t even fully investigated and comprehended the current context of the people you want to represent, how could you possibly comprehend how someone you want to represent behaves in new circumstances?
Personas are meaningless averages
According to Shlomo Goltz’s introduction article on Smashing Magazine, a persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real person; rather, it is a composite of numerous observations made by different people. A well-known critique to this aspect of personas is that the average person does not exist, as per 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 fitting within that average seat.
The same limitation applies to mental aspects of people. Have you ever heard a famous person say something disparagingly about how they “got what I said”? They used my words, but I didn’t mean it like that”. The celebrity’s statement was literally reported, but the reporter failed to explain the context and how the non-verbal expressions were used. As a result, the intended meaning was lost. You do the same when you create personas: you collect somebody’s statement ( or goal, or need, or emotion ), of which the meaning can only be understood if you provide its own specific context, yet report it as an isolated finding.
However, personas go one step further, combining a decontextualized finding with a different decontextualized finding. The resulting set of findings often does not make sense: it’s unclear, or even contrasting, because it lacks the underlying reasons on why and how that finding has arisen. There is no significance to it. 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 usefulness of the persona?
The validity of personas can be deceiving.
To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. To overcome this, designers create and add “relative” details to personas to make them resemble actual people. Nothing captures the absurdity of this better than a sentence by 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 merely an abstraction? If something is artificial, let’s present it as such.
Designers create new context to create ( their own ) meaning after acknowledging that people’s personalities are fixed, ignored the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings. In doing so, as with everything they create, they introduce a host of biases. As phrased by Designit, as designers we can” contextualize ] the persona ] based on our reality and experience. We establish trustworthy connections with people. This practice reinforces stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality with every detail added.
If we want to conduct good design research by reporting the reality “as-is” and making it relatable for our audience, everyone should use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response.
Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas
If we shouldn’t use personas, what should we do instead?
Designit suggested using mindsets as opposed to 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 stay away from focusing solely on one person’s way of life. Unfortunately, while being a step in the right direction, this proposal doesn’t take into account that people are part of an environment that determines their personality, their behavior, and, yes, their mindset. Therefore, Mindsets are also not absolute but change in regard to the situation. Is the question still unanswered as to what factors lead to a particular mindset?
Another alternative comes from Margaret P., author of the article” Kill Your Personas“, who has argued for replacing personas with persona spectrums that consist of a range of user abilities. A visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Persona spectrums are highly useful for more inclusive and context-based design, as they’re based on the understanding that the context is the pattern, not the personality. Their limitation, however, is that they have a very functional take on users that misses the relatability of a real person taken from within a spectrum.
By developing an alternative to personas, we want to change the traditional design process to be context-based. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify, just like we tried to do previously with people. Then, how do we discover these patterns? How do we ensure truly context-based design?
Understand real individuals in multiple contexts
Nothing can be more inspiring and relatable than reality. Therefore, we have to understand real individuals in their multi-faceted contexts, and use this understanding to fuel our design. We define our dynamic selves as how we define them.
Let’s take a look at what the approach looks like, based on an example of how one of us applied it in a recent project that researched habits of Italians 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. Choose the right sample
When we debate personas, we frequently get slammed for asking,” Where are you going to find a single person who encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced personas?” The answer is simple: you don’t have to. You don’t need to have information about many people for your insights to be deep and meaningful.
Accuracy is more important in qualitative research from accurate sampling than quantity. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If you choose this sample wisely and have a thorough 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.
Similarly, you don’t need to understand Susan in fifteen different contexts. You’ve come to understand Susan’s reaction to various circumstances once you’ve seen her in a few different settings. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.
Because each person is representative of a portion of the population you’re researching, it becomes clear why each person should be depicted as an individual because each already represents an abstraction of a larger group of people in similar circumstances. You don’t want 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 select a representative sample? First of all, you have to consider what’s the target audience of the product or service you are designing: it might be useful to look at the company’s goals and strategy, the current customer base, and/or a possible future target audience.
In our example project, we were putting together an application for those who already have smart thermostats. In the future, everyone could have a smart thermostat in their house. Right now, though, only early adopters own one. To create a sizable sample, we had to understand the causes of the development of these early adopters. We therefore recruited by asking people why they had a smart thermostat and how they got it. There were those who had chosen to purchase it, those who had influenced the decisions of others, and those who had discovered 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. Because of this, your qualitative data will be enriched with examples and anecdotes. In our example project, given COVID-19 restrictions, we converted an in-house ethnographic research effort into remote family interviews, conducted from home and accompanied by diary studies.
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 add their spouses, husbands, children, or sporadically even pets to make their stories much more intriguing and precise. We also focused on the relationships with other meaningful people ( such as colleagues or distant family ) and all the behaviors that resulted from those relationships. This extensive field of study enabled us to develop a vivid mental image of dynamic situations involving multiple actors.
It’s essential that the scope of the research remains broad enough to be able to include all possible actors. Therefore, it normally works best to define broad research areas with macro questions. Interviews should be conducted semi-structured, with follow-up inquiries that cover subjects the interviewee has blatantly mentioned. This open-minded “plan to be surprised” will yield the most insightful findings. When we inquired about how his family controlled the house temperature, one of our participants responded,” My wife uses WhatsApp instead, and she has not installed the thermostat’s app.” If she wants to turn on the heater and she is not home, she will text me. I am her thermostat”.
3. Analysis: Create the Dynamic Selves
You begin by presenting each individual as a” Self,” representing one of the circumstances you have examined throughout the analysis of your research. The core of each Dynamic Self is a quote, which comes supported by a photo and a few relevant demographics that illustrate the wider context. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. Because our research focused on families and their way of life to understand their needs for thermal regulation, the key demographics were family type, number and type of homes owned, economic status, and technological maturity in our case. ( We also included the individual’s name and age, but they’re optional—we included them to ease the stakeholders ‘ transition from personas and be able to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person ).
To capture precise quotations, interviews must be taped on video and verbatim whenever possible. This is essential to the truthfulness of the several Selves of each participant. In the case of real-life ethnographic research, photos of the context and anonymized actors are essential to build realistic Selves. Direct from field research should be used to take these photos, but also an evocative and representative image may do. However, these photos should be realistic and accurately depicting meaningful actions that you associate with your participants. For example, one of our interviewees told us about his mountain home where he used to spend every weekend with his family. We therefore depicted him hiking 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. Each card displayed a situation, represented by a quote and a unique photo. Each participant had a series of self-portraits.
4. Identify innovative applications
Once you have collected all main quotes from the interview transcripts and diaries, and laid them all down as Self cards, you will see patterns emerge. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.
In our example project, there was a particularly fascinating insight regarding the topic of humidity. We realized that people don’t know what humidity is and why it is important to monitor it for health: an environment that’s too dry or too wet can cause respiratory problems or worsen existing ones. This made it clear that our client had a significant opportunity to provide training for users about the concept and practice as a health advisor.
Benefits of Dynamic Selves
When you use the Dynamic Selves approach in your research, you start to notice unique social relations, peculiar situations real people face and the actions that follow, and that people are surrounded by changing environments. Davide, one of the participants in our thermostat project, is described as a boyfriend, dog lover, and tech nut.
Davide is an individual we might have once reduced to a persona called” tech enthusiast”. There are also those who enjoy technology who are wealthy or poor, have families or are single, and who love technology. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.
Once you have understood Davide in multiple situations, and for each situation have understood in sufficient depth the underlying reasons for his behavior, you’re able to generalize how he would act in another situation. You can use your understanding of him to infer what he would think and do in the circumstances ( or scenarios ) you create.
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 others, and the larger the group, the smaller it is to feel empathy for others. We feel the strongest empathy for individuals we can personally relate to.
If you take a real person as inspiration for your design, you no longer need to create an artificial character. No more developing novel plot devices to “understand” the character, no more implausible biases. It’s simply how this person is in real life. In fact, because we all know these characters don’t really exist, personas quickly turn into nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens.
Another powerful benefit of the Dynamic Selves approach is that it raises the stakes of your work: if you mess up your design, someone real, a person you and the team know and have met, is going to feel the consequences. It might stop you from taking shortcuts and will remind you to conduct daily checks on your designs.
Finally, real people in their specific contexts provide a stronger foundation for anecdotal storytelling and increase persuasion effectiveness. Documentation of real research is essential in achieving this result. By giving more weight and urgency, it supports your design arguments:” When I met Alessandra, the circumstances of her workplace struck me. Noise, bad ergonomics, lack of light, you name it. If we go for this functionality, I’m afraid we’re going to add complexity to her life”.
Conclusion
Designit stated in an article on Mindsets 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 disregard the complexity of the decision-making processes of our users and disregard how submerged they are in their surroundings are.
Design needs simplification but not 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. Avoid using those, instead using them to express the person in each of their situations. Both insights and people come with a context, they cannot be cut from that context because it would remove meaning.
In its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty, design needs to break away from fiction and turn to reality as our guide and inspiration.
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