An Empathetic Persona

One of my personas is a guy named Joey, and he’s loosely based on someone I know in real life. As I reviewed the user research I just kept getting reminded of him, so I used some basics of my friend’s personal life to round out the narrative; I gave Joey his neighborhood, a similar dog, a similar boyfriend, and I even used his Facebook profile photo in the persona.

Two years later, I signed into Facebook one morning and learned that Joey’s inspiration had broken up with his real-life boyfriend. I got into the office, and saw his smiling face on a wall of our studio and told the team, “Joey broke up with Robert last night.”

I know designers are by nature sensitive souls, but I was genuinely moved by their response. They weren’t sad for the real person, they were sad for Joey. They talked about that time Joey bought Robert a new laptop for Christmas, how their dog, Rory, liked to chew on power cords… they wondered who was going to move out and what this meant for the future. These were all user scenarios we had written. None of it had ever happened, because Joey never existed.

The danger of stock characters.

We create personas to remind us throughout the design process who our targets are. We’re not designing for us, we’re designing for “Marie”.

“Marie” is based on user research, and she’s a fictitious representation of our target groups. She’s also probably really boring. She’s a nice women, married to a nice man, and she has nice children. The only things about her that aren’t generic are the reasons we’re designing for her. She’s all those nice things, but darnit she wishes that there was an easier way to balance work and home! Or keep her to-do list organized! Or feed her children nutritious food!

Then we start designing and all we ever remember about Marie is that one problem, and she becomes this background character, and before you know it we’re designing for the problem and not the user. I see it over and over in portfolio presentations, there’s a persona somewhere near the front and I never hear about them again. When I ask a younger designer to connect their persona back to their final design, it’s like asking to connect that butterfly flapping it’s wings to a hurricane in Asia.

This is the danger of stock characters. They, by definition, are flat. They don’t pull focus, and they don’t demand our attention. If the whole goal of personas is to remind us who we’re designing for, then shouldn’t we be creating more complex personas?

Creating someone to remember.

I love personas. Aside from being the representative of the user in our process, they’re also the first thing we design. Up until this moment it’s been research and strategy decisions, but in creating a persona we birth something new — and even better, it’s an entire human being.

I have a thousand tips and tricks up my sleeves for creating truly memorable personas, but they all boil down to a simple concept… make them imperfect. Give them challenges to overcome, faults that hold them back, and self-destructive habits. Put them in a negative space so we can root for them!

We are far more likely to have empathy for an underdog slammed by life than a modern-day June Cleaver like Marie. For example, let’s imagine Marie’s neighbor Tanya.

Like Marie, Tanya is married with children, struggles balancing work and life, needs help organizing her to-do list, and wants to feed her children nurtitious food. They both live in the same neighborhood, and their household incomes are about the same. They fit the same target market.

But here’s what you don’t know… Tanya just lost her mom to diabetes. Her mom was her best friend and also their primary babysitter. When she got sick everything started spiraling. Tanya’s work suffered, her relationship with her husband suffered, finding new childcare has been stressful, she misses her mom so much, and she sees her children’s eating habits and is terrified about the genetics of diabetes.

Now imagine it’s ten weeks later, you’re deep into a design conversation with your engineering and product leads… who is more likely to still be fresh in your mind: Marie, or Tanya?

A few tricks…

I’ll write more posts in the future about this, but here are some ideas and inspiration points to get you started towards creating more empathetic personas:

1. Give them an astrological sign.
2. Give them an alignment.
3. Give them a motivating tragedy.
4. Give them a personality disorder.

Good luck to you (and to Tanya). Oh, and “Joey” is doing just fine.