ISG Playbook
APIs
User Personas Need to Evolve
Reading Time 6 Mins
UX designers often create user personas that are aesthetically pleasing but contain irrelevant details, diminishing their usefulness for teams. Furthermore, these personas often lack important contextual information and user behaviors that highlight the challenges and frustrations faced by users. Without these critical details, personas become mere deliverables, failing to fulfill their intended purpose of bridging the gap between design teams and the people they aim to assist. What personas truly require is relevance, a quality that is often sacrificed in the pursuit of simplicity and speed.
Why rethink personas?
According to Alan Cooper's book "About Face," designers and teams often mistakenly use "user profile" interchangeably with "user persona," although the two concepts differ significantly. While a profile is a high-level description of a user avatar, a persona is rooted in real users and derived from user research and observations. Personas offer a precise framework for understanding and communicating user behavior, thoughts, goals, and motivations. They serve as a gateway to comprehend user behavior and foster inclusivity and equity in product and service design.
What’s wrong with personas
Internet examples of user personas often prioritize visual appeal over effective communication of content. While aesthetics are important, overly simplified personas offer limited value to UX teams, leading to doubts about their usefulness. The confusion and problems associated with personas go beyond simplicity and misunderstanding. Unclear purposes for creating personas can divert focus to visuals rather than information. While personas can serve as deliverables, they are primarily intended to foster empathy among design teams and provide insights to team members who didn't directly engage in user research. They should be self-explanatory and enable interaction designers to grasp user needs even without direct involvement in the initial research.
Surface at best, stereotypical at worst
Many user personas overly emphasize demographic details, leading to shallow understandings and the potential for biased stereotypes based on gender, ethnicity, age, and economic status. Stereotypes perpetuate surface-level assumptions that simplify the social world but hinder problem-solving for UX teams. To truly understand users, practitioners must delve beneath the surface, recognizing that behaviors are context-dependent and not limited to specific generations or ethnic groups. Furthermore, personas that lack value are often disregarded in subsequent design stages, whereas effective personas inform user flows, relevant features, and interactions, enabling teams to address specific user needs and preferences and drive decision-making.
How User Personas Should Evolve – 5 Steps
Opportunity | Action & Improvement |
|---|---|
| 1) Inclusive behaviors over exclusionary demographics | To enhance the value of user personas, they should focus on relevance, fostering empathy, and understanding user context. Storytelling and detailed descriptions should take precedence over visual elements that can lead to stereotypes. An updated persona framework should prioritize inclusive behaviors, attitudes and user context, while avoiding irrelevant details. Demographic information can impede unbiased judgments, especially when target user groups encompass diverse categories. Instead of shaping personas based on appearance, grouping users by behaviors promotes inclusivity, equity, and guards against assumptions and stereotypes. |
| 2) Contextual Behaviors | Providing context is a way development teams can include storytelling in their personas. The persona should answer these four questions:
The answers to these questions should come from user research and can be paired with a customer journey map to help fully understand the need. |
3) Multiple Photos | To avoid reinforcing stereotypes and excluding certain groups, design teams should utilize multiple photos instead of relying on a single image to represent a persona. By showcasing users in the context of using the product or engaging in relevant tasks, teams can combat unconscious biases and encourage a broader perspective that transcends age, gender, and ethnicity, particularly when personas exhibit behaviors that encompass diverse demographic groups. |
4) General vs Specific | To prevent misunderstandings and overgeneralizations, UX teams should prioritize specificity when addressing pain points. Rather than using vague terms like "time," it is crucial to delve into the specific nature of the user's pain. This includes exploring and expressing the symptoms of insufficient time, lack of time management tools, lack of focus, or excessive distractions. By providing clear and detailed descriptions of the user's challenges, teams can avoid leaving room for individual interpretations that may result in misconceptions. |
5) Test personas by “walking in their shoes” | Finally, test the effectiveness of the persona by attempting to walk in their shoes. Not everyone on the development team will have been involved in the user research, and the persona is a proxy for communicating these learnings. Teams should ask themselves these questions in order to determine the effectiveness of a persona.
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Synopsis
The serious need for user personas to evolve in the field of UX design is highlighted by some common issues with personas, such as containing irrelevant details, lacking important contextual information and user behaviors, and prioritizing visual appeal over effective communication with an overemphasis on demographics that create stereotypes and generalizations. The key emphasis and importance of relevance, inclusivity, and earnestly understanding the user context in persona development is critical. The five-steps for process improvement, include focusing on inclusive behaviors, providing contextual behaviors, build storytelling descriptions, along with using multiple photos, prioritizing specific symptoms of pains-points, and then with your team, testing the personas' effectiveness under pointed conditions that builds empathy for users.
HOWARD MONTGOMERY
Howard is a practicing agnostic Human-Centered Design Thinking expert who thrives across the consumer experience continuum of products, services, digital, brand, strategy, and environments. He has led, collaborated and consulted with multiple Fortune 100 companies: Ford Motor, Unilever, BMW, The Home Depot, Steelcase, P&G and LG Electronics across diverse business sectors; building products, automotive, consumer, food and healthcare. He holds 48 International Patents and has been the recipient of over 25 international awards including IDEA Awards, iF Award and Good Design Award, and multiple publications of his work. He has taught at several schools in the USA and UK. He holds a bachelor’s degree with honors from Kingston University, London, UK and master’s degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, USA, both in Design.