A machine learning algorithm uses this man does not occur to create individual faces. It takes actual photos and recombines them into false people faces. We just squirted past a LinkedIn post that claimed this site might be helpful “if you are developing a image and looking for a photo.”
We concur that personas may remain 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 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 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 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 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 ability to analyze the data in a way that excludes the subjects 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 knowledge to know why. You end up with user images that are in reality less man.
This “decontextualization” we see in identities happens in four way, which we’ll discuss below.
People are assumed to be stable, according to people.
Here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of characteristics, 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 helpful 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 type of person you are at each precise moment depends on the context, the impact of other people, your mood, and the whole history that preceded it.
Personas do not account for this variation in their attempt to improve reality; instead, they present a consumer as a set of features. Like personality tests, personas seize people away from real existence. Even worse, persons are labeled as” that kind of individual” with no means to practice their natural freedom. This behavior defies stereotypes, diminishes diversity, and doesn’t reveal reality.
Personas rely on people, not the setting
In the real world, you’re creating content for a situation, no an entity. There are economic, political, and cultural factors to consider when a person lives in a home, a community, or an ecosystem. A pattern is not meant for a single customer. Instead, you create a design for one or more specific situations where a large number of individuals may use that product. But, personas don’t explicitly explain how a person feels about the environment, rather than show the user.
Do you generally make the same decision over and over again? Despite your pledge to eat vegan, you may still choose to purchase some meat when your friends visit. Your decisions, including your behavior, opinions, and statements, are not only completely accurate but greatly contextual because they vary with various circumstances and variables. 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 offer a explanation 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, 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? Sadly, it’s common to pick a fictional character and build a character’s behavior around a particular circumstance based on the literature. How could you possibly comprehend how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances given that you haven’t yet thoroughly investigated and understood the present context of the people you want to represent?
Personas are irrelevant statistics
A image is depicted as a specific individual but is not a real people, as stated in Shlomo Goltz’s introduction post on Smashing Magazine; instead, it is made up of observations from numerous people. The popular example of the USA Air Force designing flights based on the average of 140 of their aircraft ‘ physical dimensions and not a single pilot truly fit within that average seat is a well-known criticism of this aspect of personalities.
The same limitation applies to mental aspects of people. Have you ever heard a famous person say something like,” They took what I said 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. In the end, the intended meaning was lost. 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. Because it lacks the underlying causes for and how that finding came about, the results of the analysis frequently fail to make sense. It’s unclear or even contradictory. 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?
People’s relatability can be deceiving.
To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. Designers invent and add “relatable” details to personas to make them resemble real people in order to overcome this. 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.
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 introduce a number of biases in doing so, as with everything they produce. 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 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 getting fixated on just one person’s way of being. 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 certain Mindset, is the question still unanswered.
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 ). 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 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. 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. This approach is known 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. 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 choose the individuals 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 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 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 remains: how do you select a sample representative? First of all, you must consider who the target market is for the product or service you are designing. It might be helpful to take into account 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 could have a smart thermostat in their home 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 other people’s decisions, 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. This will give you more examples and anecdotes to enrich your qualitative data. Given COVID-19 restrictions, we transformed an internal ethnographic research project into remote family interviews conducted at home and accompanied by diary research for 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 into being with them. 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. This “plan to be surprised” will allow for the most enlightening findings. 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 help to illustrate the larger context. 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. 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 the completeness of each participant’s various selves. 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 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. A quote and a unique photo were displayed on each card, each illustrating a situation. Each participant had a different deck full of self-assessments.
4. Identify potential designs
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
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 referred to as 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 then generalize how Davide would act in a different situation once you have understood him in more detail and have fully grasped 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 compassion for people with whom we can directly 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. 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 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. The circumstances of your design proposals resound in your mind when you encounter Alessandra. 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
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 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 as metaphors for the person in all of their contexts. People and insights both come with a context, and they cannot be taken out of that context because it would detract from 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.
