Personas: Collecting Pearls
Make me a fashionista!
As someone who transitioned from academic research some years ago, the notion of personas always seemed a little off-center. To me it felt like, “We have all this data. Now let’s take this part and call it ‘Bob, aged 43’”. Why do we need Bob, though? Why can’t we just, oh, I don’t know… use the data? My unease was perpetuated by rumblings from the research trenches and persona name-calling (e.g. “use cases with hats”). It was difficult not to scoff when a product lead suggested we “try” them for one of our new products. “I think one of them could be more like a minimalist, and another could be a fashionista”, he grinned. I cried.
Can we talk?
Still, I heard whispers from friends and colleagues that it’s all in the technique, the context, and the interaction of the two. So I did what any sufficiently curious UX researcher would do. I organized a meeting. Specifically, a BayCHI Birds of a Feather panel (see here for more on BayCHI). My panelists were four outstanding researchers working in very different spaces: Indi Young (cofounder of Adaptive Path), Paige Bennett (DropBox), Nikki Knox (WW, formerly WeightWatchers), and Xuan Zhao (Robinhood). Each of these incredible women have successfully created and used personas to significantly inform (and transform) the trajectory of their products. The ‘pearls’ they gave me helped me appreciate that personas can be much more than just pretty photos and summary tables. Speaking of which —
Pearl 1: More of a movie than a photo
Indi Young pointed out that the multifarious nature of personas are part of their bad rap. Some folks seem to weave colorful personas to suit their project overnight, while others spend months developing them. Some personas are more “Cooper-like” with professions and pet-peeves, while other teams refuse to use names or even pictures. However, the common thread of personas that really work is rigorous research. While personas like “Audrey, 29, mother of three” can help make design decisions, they can also introduce unwanted assumptions, bias, and ultimately blind spots (see more here). We need to be more specific if personas are to be useful. We start by considering information from data science, marketing, competitive analyses, and previous UX research. This lets us know, broadly, the groups of users we’re interested in and potential gaps in knowledge. In addressing these gaps, we add flesh to the bones by way of observed behavior patterns, unique needs (particularly around communication), and contextual considerations. Personas can be more than just neat posters — indeed, they can be organized by their behavioral traits rather than demographics.
Still, bland, non-memorable personas don’t work. One of the reasons that Cooper-style personas are industry standard is that you can empathize with them immediately. Nikki Knox (WW) points out that personas are one of many communication tools. They are effective at illustrating behavior patterns within a market segment. But we need to elaborate if they are to be useful. We consider the entire person, and the entire journey, goals and intentions, which leads to the second pearl: personas allow you to respond to changing contexts.
Pearl 2: Personas help you problem-solve by providing a framework
Unlike market segments, personas can represent change and responses to varying circumstances. These changes also include states of readiness and how they want to be communicated with. Nikki Knox (WW) said of one of her personas on a weight loss journey, “If you ask if she wants to do a 5K at the beginning, that’s not a great idea. It takes about 1–3 months to learn the food program and consider adding a new challenge… it’s about the right information surfaced at the right time”. Thus, messaging and language when it comes to communicating changes according to both persona and context. Outreach may sound more supportive and calming during early days for one persona, but more energetic and enticing for others.
Could this information have been obtained without the use of personas? Probably. But personas help us save time by allowing us to frame problems according to our prior data. Every persona carries a unique set of people problems, so you can now decide which problem you’re going to address. How might you get one of your more reticent personas to engage in more online community-based activities? Do they need more proof points, or encouragement from a friend? You have a framework to think about the kinds of problems you have, and potential metrics for success. Moreover, we can now consider what these pieces of information mean to each person on our team.
Pearl 3: By teams, for teams
Personas are ultimately driven by pragmatism — they are tools that are only valuable in so far as they are useful to the product and the team. Personas can have a strong foundation in quantitative research and analysis (e.g. segment work). But back to pragmatism — if the data reveals several segments, you’d need to consider variables that are the most predictive, you choose a cutoff. Who would remember 10 personas?
The process and journey of creating the personas can be as valuable as the end product. This is particularly true of new products or new teams who otherwise may not get an opportunity to collaborate with research or each other. The process of researching and creating personas brings teams together. The persona creation process can vary from team to team; it can be messy and intense, but it ultimately builds empathy for the user and each other.
The creation of personas can bring additional insights that other methods in isolation do not. Often teams have market segments, but no personas. Market segments are typically grouped according to specific needs or demographic characteristics. Personas can help us understand contextual considerations, for instance, why a particular segment is not behaving in an expected way. Paige Bennett (Dropbox, formerly from WW) discussed getting out in the field and even peeking in people’s fridges as a relatively new team. “The site visits were incredibly useful. You get key insights that you otherwise might miss by observing users in their own environments.” Your data may reveal a segment for “organizers”, amongst others, which has personal characteristics, decision-making tendencies, and regional considerations. But by peering in the fridges and creating the personas, you’ll reveal nuances — exceptions to the organization, special rules, or unexpected commonalities — that are otherwise hard to conceptualize.
In addition to gaining invaluable information regarding behavioral patterns, having cross-functional team members engage (e.g. designers, engineers, etc.) can help deliver specific, valuable considerations that pertain to their role and the whole product. Personas can have different implications depending on which part of the product you work on. A little while ago I worked on productivity devices, and we conducted a number of site visits to understand our users. We invited along PMs, designers, engineers — you name it. I was pleasantly surprised to find an engineer colleague scribbling notes furiously during the outings. “I don’t get to see this kind of stuff!” he would gush, and “…the workaround are really important to me, the stuff they barely think about any more”. The stuff they don’t think to mention in an interview. The cross-functional collaboration can also garner company-wide recognition for you and the personas. Xuan Zhao (Robinhood) discussed how she created personas that became part of the everyday vernacular of product discussions and decisions.”This is a tool that can develop empathy. I’ll hear people talking about the product in terms of “this is good for the “Risktakers”, but not the “Curmudgeons””…the impact can be very pervasive.”
Pearl 4: Everything changes, including personas
Part of my reluctance towards personas was my own experience of seeing personas collecting dust on a desk. This most likely occurred because the personas had served their purpose (if that), and the team, project and organization had moved on. Like death and taxes, this is inevitable — teams change, organizations change. The research point person may change. But personas don’t have to wither away if you leave. They can stay alive, and they can also move and grow.
More generally, there needs to be a steady stream of incoming data. With each new piece of information, we augment existing mental models and tweak pre-existing considerations. This is especially true with strategy changes — personas may need to evolve, or even make room for new personas.
So, do I…?
Or maybe personas aren’t actually appropriate for this project. How do you know when they are or aren’t? There are several factors to take into consideration, including (and not insignificantly) whether or not you can sustain them. From our panel discussion and Q&A, I put together a (non-exclusive) list of factors that might lead you to consider personas (see Table).
Is there a magic number of factors after which you should consider personas? Probably not. The number could even be zero. Much like the personas themselves, the decision to make them is driven by a consideration of factors and pragmatism. You might consider a small pilot. But if your overwhelming feeling is that they’re a tool that won’t work for you, your project, or your team, nobody would fault you for using one (or more) of the many other data gathering and conceptualization tools available to us as researchers.
Personas aren’t the “end all be all”, but they can be exactly what a team needs depending on where they are in their product development or design processes. They’re a great tool for simply getting the entire product team on the same page regarding who they’re building the product for. The exercise of working on and developing personas as a team brings shared empathy for the users. Rather than thinking “time sink”, think “team sync” — in that teams can move faster when you don’t have members who ask “why should I care?” Personas may not be “real”, but that’s a real benefit.
