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Customer Experience and Design

Part 2 – What to do about “the too familiar persona?”

Read part 1: The too familiar persona
The all too familiar persona
I imagine we’ve all used Cooper’s personas to routinely “engage the empathy of the design and development toward the human target of the design.” Nothing wrong in using goal directed personas, however one user profile model isn’t the best fit for every brand or its users’ motivations and unmet needs. So if we are going to hinge a design’s behavior on a handful of personas they better be the ‘right’ ones. As Dr. Lene Nielsen suggests we need to create a vivid and realistic description of fictitious people and treat personas as more than stereotypes. This is the greatest challenge I’ve encountered – to keep personas relevant, fleshed out, authentic, and alive to team members; another challenge, to not see them as an exercise that must be completed to move on with design.
By no coincidence I stumbled upon an article by Laura Klein that shares a similar sentiment. “We can do better. Frankly, most teams can improve their process for creating personas in a lot of ways, but there’s one problem that’s inherent in even decently researched and constructed personas: even the best personas tend to be descriptive, but not predictive.” Klein makes a good point. To recap in my words, I’ve conducted user interviews and constructed some form of a persona, could be proto-personas or goal directed personas, sometimes user profiles. In one case I created a narrative of a user who makes a perfect stand-in for a group of users. I did this for a transportation client and had a blast talking with the young and hip “bus queen.” I’m not making this up; it’s what her NYC friends call her. These are reliable research models, but I wanted to go further so I researched other methods to extend persona’s shelf life and include them in the entire design process.
In my opinion no one understands personas any better than veteran researcher Whitney Quesenbery. Earlier this year I listened to her 2012 UIE talk on the characteristics of effective personas. Keeping them ‘alive’ during the entire duration of a product lifecycle was the theme of her talk. She shared several ideas that are realistic for most of my work, perhaps not so much for others.

  • Infuse team conversations with the persona – mentally explore them, talk about them with your team and see them as different people; these are ideas drawn from Whitney’s experience. So I say go one-step further. For example, at your next standup or daily check-in say, “I’ve invited Anita to our stand-up,” and then role-play as Anita. That will probably raise eyebrows but so what. Have fun with it.
  • Introduce them to the team through stories drawn from user research material, and researcher’s insights and impressions – sadly I don’t’ do this enough, retelling users’ stories to the team. As Whitney would say it “creates a new triangle between personas, researchers and the team.
  • Be the persona – being the first person invites identification and empathy with the persona. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote a short tale of the “bus queen” but not in the first person! Whitney’s suggestion takes the idea further, to create a confessional tale as if you are that persona, taking on his/her point of view.
  • Channel personas and use them to run an expert review – typically at some point the product will need a refresh or redesign so review it through the eyes of your personas. Dana Chisnell and Ginny Redish took this approach and started by writing the story: “Why are they using it? How do they feel about it? What do they expect or hope will happen? What are their goals?” This is a lower budget but effective approach to testing products where it’s difficult to recruit participants.
  • Use personas to evaluate tasks – It takes any dispute or bias out of team conversations when “Julio” identifies variations in how he interacts with a user scenario versus the researcher speaking as his stand in.
  • Make screen recordings to talk through interactions and terminology from the personas’ viewpoints. As a researcher this is a useful method to compare and contrast the differences in how the personas react to different designs. And imagine that they rate proposed ideas and features in the design! These rating can then be prioritized. Ask…
    • Would each persona use it (or not)?
    • Would each persona value it (how much and why)?
    • Would it be a differentiator?

These are terrific ideas. They are ones that will help grow our understanding of how to stretch personas’ by using them well into later stages of the design process. I would think personas could be used to spin-off other brands, or to generate ideas for existing ones. I’m sure you have other ideas, so let’s keep sharing them. I’d love to hear your own experiences with the all too familiar persona.

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Lisa McMichael

Lisa McMichael is a Senior Manager Digital Accessibility, CPACC with the Detroit Business Unit.

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