The Marriage of Personas & Archetypes
#3 in the series of Making Stuff Up
If you’ve read my piece on not being afraid to make something up, you’ll know that I’m really into bending frameworks, templates, etc. Quoting myself,
“[…] those templates, processes, cool diagrams, they were made by another human, just like you — there’s not some Design God making the holy grail of diagrams that everyone must use — it’s another human that made something up because it helped them.
My History with Personas & Archetypes
Personas
In college I learned about Personas, and they seemed really great . A helpful infographic and story with who your target audience is, what they do, what their challenges are, it sounds like design thinking at its best.
In a nutshell, a persona might look like “Anita, 28, with 3 kids is a knitting fanatic who wants somewhere to store her patterns.”
But as documented in a lot of places, there’s potential for misuse. With their fictional bent, it’s easy to fall into making them up based off your own thoughts and opinions, and not on data.
Archetypes
When I worked at the advertising agency, Ansira, we used archetypes instead. Archetypes use broader strokes to describe the audience, generally by behavior or role.
Continuing the example above, an archetype might look like, “Frequent knitter needing to store patterns.”
I liked that about archetypes — the demographic data seemed to be distractors and rarely made a difference in my designs. But, with removing the story and some of the details, they felt a little less human- which is arguably not the point of design thinking.
Something New
So it seems both are necessary for their different pros — archetypes for their broader strokes in capturing a group of people, and personas for capturing humanity. Just like content strategy & sitemaps are necessary, perhaps another marriage could be performed.
Here’s an example, blurred a bit for privacy.
The first column is typical archetype information — behavioral needs, attributes, and ranges.
The next two columns are for Personas inside of the entry-level archetype.
I’ve used this for one project, and so far it has been really well received.
What about you?
Do you use personas or archetypes? How have you bended or molded them for your needs?
Did this help you?
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Ashley Crutcher is the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.
