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 website might be helpful “if you are developing a image and looking for a photo.”
We agree: the computer-generated heads could be a great fit for personas—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 photos. Knowledge is taken out of natural environment and recombined into an isolated preview that’s detached from reality.
However, oddly enough, people are personas to serve as a source of inspiration for architecture in the real world.
Personas: A action up
Most manufacturers have created, used, or come across personalities at least once in their profession. The Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters that you create based on your research in order to represent the various consumer types that might use your company, product, blog, or brand,” according to their article” Personas- A Simple Introduction.” 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 ). 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
Personas are common because they make “dry” research information more realistic, more people. However, this approach places a cap on the author’s ability to exclude the target people 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 history knowledge to understand why. You end up with depictions of people that are really less people.
This “decontextualization” we see in identities happens in four way, which we’ll discuss below.
People are assumed to be stable, according to people.
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 think, act, and think differently in various circumstances. You appear distinct to different people, you may act helpful to some, tough to others. And you change your mind all the time about selections you’ve taken.
Current psychologists concur that while individuals typically act in accordance with specific patterns, how people act and make decisions is ultimately influenced by a combination of history and culture. The context—the atmosphere, the effect of other people, your feelings, the whole story that led up to a situation—determines the kind of person you are in each particular time.
Personalities do not account for this variation in their attempt to reduce reality; instead, they present a consumer as a predetermined set of features. Like character tests, personas seize people away from real life. Even worse, individuals are reduced to a brand and categorized as” that kind of guy” with no means to practice their inherent flexibility. This behavior defies stereotypes, diminishes variety, and doesn’t indicate reality.
Personas rely on people, not the environment
You’re designing for a environment, not an individual, in the real world. Each individual lives in a community, a group, an habitat, where there are environmental, social, and cultural factors you need to consider. A pattern is not meant for a single customer. Instead, you create a product that is intended to be used by a certain number of people. Personas, but, show the customer alone rather than explain how the consumer relates to the environment.
Would you choose the exact course of action repeatedly? Maybe you’re a dedicated vegan but also decide to buy some meats when your family are coming across. As they depend on various situations and characteristics, your decisions—and behavior, thoughts, and comments —are no absolute but extremely contextual. Because it doesn’t explain the grounds for your decisions, the persona that “represents” you doesn’t take into account this interdependence. It doesn’t provide a rationale of why you act 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? However, what frequently happens is that you take a hypothetical figure and based on that fiction decide how this character may deal with a particular situation. 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. 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 was taken out of context? They used my words, but I didn’t mean it like that”. Although the celebrity’s statement was literally reported, the reporter failed to explain the context of the statement and to explain the non-verbal expressions. 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 a step further, combining a decontextualized finding with another decontextualized finding from someone else. 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. 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 usefulness of the persona?
People’s relatability 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 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. 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? If something is artificial, let’s present it as such.
After accepting that people’s personalities are fixed, ignored the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers create new context to create ( their own ) meaning. 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 make connections that are well-known to us. This practice reinforces stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality with every detail added.
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
If we shouldn’t use personas, what should we do instead?
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, 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. What determines a certain Mindset, is the question still unanswered.
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. For instance, 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.
We want to change the traditional design process to be context-based by creating an alternative to personas. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify, just like we tried to do previously with people. How can we identify these patterns, then? How do we ensure truly context-based design?
Understand real individuals in multiple 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 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 contest personas, we are frequently met with the words” Where are you going to find a single person that 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.
Quantity is key to qualitative research, but sampling accuracy is key to its validity. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If you select the right sample and 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.
Similarly, you don’t need to understand Susan in fifteen different contexts. You have understood Susan’s plan of action once you have 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.
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 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 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.
We were creating an application for those who own a smart thermostat in our example project. In the future, everyone could have a smart thermostat in their house. Right now, though, only early adopters own one. We had to understand the causes behind these early adopters ‘ development in order to create a sizable sample. We therefore recruited by asking people why they had a smart thermostat and how they got it. 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. 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 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 focused on the relationships with other meaningful people ( such as colleagues or distant family ) and all the behaviors that resulted from those relationships. With this extensive investigation, we were able to create vivid images 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. Follow-up questions will be written down in a way that is best suited for an interview, and they should be conducted in a semi-structured manner. This open-minded “plan to be surprised” will yield the most insightful findings. 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 am 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. 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. 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. ( 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 ).
Interviews and notes must be recorded verbatim as much as possible in order to capture precise quotes. 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. These photos should be taken directly from field research, but any image that is evocative and representative will do, as long as it’s accurate and depicts 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. 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. Each card displayed a situation, represented by a quote and a unique photo. All participants had several cards about themselves.
4. Identify creative uses
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.
There was a particularly intriguing insight around the concept of humidity in our example project. 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 clear that our client had a significant opportunity to train users about the concept and work 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. One of the participants in our thermostat project, Davide, 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”. 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 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 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; the bigger 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 creating new plot devices to “realize” the character, no more implausible bias. It’s simply how this person is in real life. In fact, as we all know, personas quickly turn into nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens because these characters don’t really exist.
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 better foundation for anecdotal storytelling and are thus more effective at persuasion. Documentation of real research is essential in achieving 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. If we go for this functionality, I’m afraid we’re going to add complexity to her life”.
Conclusion
In their article on Mindsets, Designit mentioned 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 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 and use them to describe the person in all of their contexts. Both insights and people come with a context, they cannot be cut from that context because it would remove meaning.
It’s high time for design to break away from fiction and use reality as our guide and inspiration, in its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty.
