This Person Does Not Exist is a website that uses a machine learning algorithm to create individual heads. It takes actual photos and recombines them into false human faces. We just squirted past a LinkedIn article that claimed this site might be helpful “if you are developing a image and looking for a photo.”
We concur that computer-generated eyes 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, much like in the photos. 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.
Personas: A action up
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 ability to exclude the target users 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 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. Although many businesses still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ), You act, think, and feel different according to the conditions you experience. You appear distinct to different people, and you might act friendly toward some and harshly toward another. And you constantly change your mind regarding 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.
Personalities do not account for this variation in their attempt to improve reality; instead, they present a consumer as a predetermined 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 environment
You’re designing for a perspective, not an individual, in the real world. 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 product that is intended to be used by a certain number of people. But, personas don’t explicitly explain how a person feels about the environment, rather than display the user.
Do you often 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 friends visit. Your decisions, including your behavior, opinions, and statements, are not only completely accurate but very 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 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? However, 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 percentages
A image is depicted as a specific individual but is not a real person, 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!” 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 lacks clarity and even contrast because it lacks the fundamental justifications 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 usefulness?
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 better explains 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. 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 only an abstraction? 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. They introduce a number of biases in doing so, as with everything they produce. As designers, as Designit puts it, 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 “as-is” reality and make it relatable for our audience so that everyone can use their own empathy and formula for 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 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 ). 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 can we identify these patterns, then? How do we ensure truly context-based design?
Understand real people in a variety of settings
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 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 answer is straightforward: you don’t have 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 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.
In fifteen different situations, Susan is not necessary. 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 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 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 then become much more interesting and precise with the additions made by their spouses, husbands, 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 scope of the study 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. This “plan to be surprised” will allow for the most enlightening findings. One of our participants responded to our question about how his family controlled the house temperature by saying,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app; she uses WhatsApp instead. 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. We also included the individual’s name and age, but they’re optional; they’ll help 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 authentic selves in ethnographic research conducted in real life. 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 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 humidity monitoring for health and how an environment 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
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 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 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 creating new plot devices to “realize” the character, no more implausible biases. 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 stop using shortcuts and reminds you to check your designs every day.
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. It reinforces your design arguments with more urgency and weight:” 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 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 complexity of the decision-making processes of our users and don’t take into account the contexts that humans are immersed in.
Design needs to be simplified, but not 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. Avoid using those and use them to describe the person in all of their contexts. 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.
