In Defense of Drawing
Personas are a very powerful tool in Human-Centered Design. Personas allow designers to rally around archetypes that channel or guide the solution design process.
Persona creation is not necessarily required, though. Not directly at least. Using an Empathy Map — or more recently a Revised Empathy Map Canvas developed by XPLANE — designers are able to plot out users goals, needs, behaviors, attitudes, and pain and gain points. The Canvas is a powerful tool in itself as a structured method for identifying and defining users and user personas.
The Revised Canvas spells out the sequential process of filling in the Canvas. It also places Pains and Gains within the central figure to visually and conceptually separate observable phenomena (outside the head) and phenomena that may be inferred but not directly observed (“thoughts and feelings” inside the head).
At a recent Design Thinking Workshop I was being asked to use an Empathy Map Canvas; to be honest it was the first time I was asked to use the tool in delivering DT and immediately I saw its potential for easing a first-time DT participant’s entry into understanding the empathetic process of solutions building. I also saw where simply Empathy Mapping will fall short.
In my opinion using the (a?) canvas has the potential danger of dehumanizing or detaching the designer from the human behind the persona. By relegating the “who” into a textual representation (a name, if you will) we run the risk of returning to non-human centered design. It is in the same spirit that ad-hoc personas (personas developed from compiled, existing knowledge rather than actual face-to-face interviews) may not be real personas at all.
My contention, thus, is to move away from the Empathy Map as a canvas, and to use it, rather, as a template for directly developing personal through drawing. My personal experience with persona building has always revolved around actual illustrations of users developed through empathetic work and research. I have seen how the illustrations — regardless of quality or artistic merit — allowed for a stronger and more emotional connection between designer and user.
The DT framework and methodology adopted and utilized by HiFi encouraged participants to visually develop and define their personas. This has allowed them to bring through a much more human face to the humans behind the data. Drawing personas also gives designers a further insight into how designers see and perceive specific users and their archetypes.
Illustrations reveal attitudes, biases, preferences, and even societal roles that were not always captured or downloaded at the initial phases of research. Where workshop data gatherers usually fail to notice behavioral nuances, these unconsciously become integrated into the visualization/s they make about the people they hope to design for.
To clarify: use a canvas, integrate empathy mapping as an integral part of Discovery work, but I would not remove illustrated personas from the DT process or supplant it with a seemingly more structured Canvas step. There is a humanizing aspect to the act of drawing and visually representing users and data.
Personas are representations of people, and it’s easy to forget that when faced with mountains of data, thematized quotations, and pre-conceived notions of our users. It’s also fairly easy to take things we already know and bring them together into ad-hoc personas which may also have a valid purpose in solutions design. Remember, though, that ultimately there is a person behind the data, and the solutions we seek to develop through a human-centered design process must respond that that person… as human.
More samples of hand-drawn personas may be found at the Benilde HiFi Facebook page
