Data, Demographics, and User Personas
Personas also bring issues of social and political consciousness to the forefront. — About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
This past week, Indi Young (User Researcher, Founder of Adaptive Path) tweeted a reminder to the design industry on its practices in developing personas, which sparked a great discussion on the relationship between demographics and human behavior.
As someone who has created and worked with personas created by others, this totally hit home.
Inadvertently, anecdotal and/or experiential data creeps in to our design process and is used to reaffirm biases, which have no effect on human behavior. The result: persona stereotypes are used in validating design decisions, having a direct, discriminatory effect and potentially alienating a subset of users.
Seemingly benign, yet blanket assumptions create ignored audience segments due to a pure lack of consideration and adequate research. The real underlying issue, which I believe Indi’s tweet highlights, is a lack of understanding on what characteristics actually make a useful and effective persona.
Personas are a communication tool used in the product design and development process to represent the complex set of behaviors, motivations, and goals of real people we have observed.
Demographic data from market research can be a great place to start in the design process, but should only be used in conjunction with qualitative user research when defining personas. Demographic data can help forecast market viability for a product, but is ineffective at defining the scope of behavior for a product, i.e. a market segment ≠ a behavior model.
Because personas provide a precise design target and also serve as a communication tool to the development team, the designer must choose particular demographic characteristics with care.
From my experience, successful personas are based on real-world observations and interviews of people. Their purpose is to create empathy for the people who will use a product, throughout the design and development process. Most importantly, personas must be context-specific; focusing on the motivations, behaviors, and goals related to a specific domain for a product. Demographics within personas should be used as part of the communication device to establish a common understanding and mutual respect from stakeholders (including marketing), developers, and other designers.
The motivations, behaviors, and goals learned from contextual observation of actual users allows for the creation of an effective persona archetype, i.e. generic characterizations of user types. If done correctly, a persona should represent a composite of behavior patterns observed across different audiences and associated demographics should be equally representative.
Archetypes versus Stereotypes
Without appropriate study and foreknowledge, or if you are new to the process, it can be difficult to discern the difference between a persona archetype and a persona stereotype.
Archetypes (specifically in regards to personas) are an aggregate model of significant and meaningful patterns of user behavior. In this manner, persona archetypes help us design for specific types of people with specific goals and motivations.
Stereotypes, by contrast, are a model of biases, assumptions, and generalizations about a particular audience, with no basis in factual data. Due to inadequate research (or empathy and cultural sensitivity), personas run the risk of devolving in to stereotypical caricatures and subsequently, negatively impacting the users of your product.
Personas must be developed and treated with dignity and respect for the people whom they represent. If the designer doesn’t respect his personas, nobody else will either.
Ethnographic Interviews
As previously mentioned, the most accurate and effective persona archetypes are based on real world observations of users. Ethnographic interviewing is the process of observing people in their natural environments in combination with one-on-one interviews to gain insight on user behavior characteristics.
There are entire books dedicated to the practice of ethnographic interviewing for designers, however below is a general process outline I follow in terms of preparing and developing a persona using ethnographic interviews:
- Develop a persona hypothesis: at this stage, if available, market demographic data can proxy for potential behavior patterns, but the goal should be to take some initial steps towards identifying different behavior models
- Create an interview plan: perform 3–6 interviews minimum to verify each hypothesized behavior model. Try not to think of each interviewee as complete persona, but a composite of behaviors that can be shared with completely different people. Thinking in this way allows for the same individuals to be reused to validate different variables and minimize the amount of overall interviews. It’s also highly recommended to perform interviews with a two-people: this allows one person to conduct the interview while the other person can take notes.
- Perform the interview: there are several notable methods for performing an interview, but in regards to collecting the appropriate information for developing personas, I generally focus on the following: avoid a set of fixed questions, focus on goals (over tasks), avoid discussions of technology and design recommendations, and if possible try to get the user to show you an example.
- Review & collect supplemental data: after the interview process is complete, review the notes gathered during the process. At this point you can begin to validate your persona hypothesis and develop accurate personas based on the actual data collected.
Almost every aspect of a well-developed persona can be traced back to a user statement or behavior.
The following is a case study of a professional project in which personas were created and the right demographic data was able to illuminate a successful path in the design process.
Case Study: a website redesign of a wireless service provider
In the spring of 2013, I had the opportunity to lead the redesign of a regional wireless service provider in Hawaii. The company branded itself as a simple, hassle-free, and cost-efficient wireless carrier with great customer service; all phones come with unlimited talk & text and you only pay extra for data, with complete plans ranging from $35–70/mo. (If you’re wondering how they can offer such a great deal, they mostly carry older phone models, and strictly Androids.) Due to their lower than normal pricing, the brand was also actively fighting the stigma of being the “cheap phone guys” and only servicing low income customers.
In fact, their data showed somewhat the opposite.
The previous website featured a legacy, fixed-width design (ie. no mobile support) and included multiple pain points in their product purchase and bill-payment user flows. Additionally, the client was interested in expanding the “self-care” portion of the site, allowing users to perform common account-level tasks online (ie. upgrade a phone, add a new line/phone number, etc.).
From a business perspective, the primary goals of the redesign were to bring the site up to date with a responsive web design, improve the overall navigation, and provide sufficient and adequate information to aid potential customers in their purchase decisions. Increasing online sales wasn’t a major concern because they were well known for their in-store customer service and wanted to maintain that human touch in the sales process.
However, what really made this project unique is the client not only had recent and relevant market data, but they also had direct access to existing customers via their cellphone numbers and a steady stream of potential customers could be intercepted at in-store locations.
Ideally, persona demographics should be a composite reflection of what researchers have observed in the interview population, modulated by broad market research.
During our Discovery (i.e., research) process, I lead several rounds of interviews, including stakeholder interviews with c-suite management, regional managers, and store managers, interviews with customer care representatives, interviews with store associates, and interviews with customers on-location (i.e., in-context). We also sent out two rounds of user surveys via text message to customers, using Google Forms to gather the data from about 1000 responses (which the company provided incentive to customers for filling out, even more amazing). Our team was additionally supplied with recent market penetration research data, conducted by a third party company just a few months prior. The market research data compared existing customers to a “prospective universe” of customers in the area.
Their data showed a large chunk of users around $50–75k, which matched exactly with Hawaii’s approx. $70k median household income for the last few years. And while their customer base did taper off as household income increased above ~$75k, 10% of their customers were in the >$150k bracket.
Some other interesting facts learned:
- 75% of their customers were on the island of Oahu, with the remaining 25% mainly split between Maui and the Big Island of Hawaii
- 55% of their customers were 45 or older
- 35% of their customers were married families
The company’s data indeed indicated they were a provider of average, typical Hawaiian families (albeit, slightly older).
Through our qualitative user research, we were able to determine over 73% of current customers (on the island of Oahu) used their smartphone as their primary device for accessing the internet. This was huge news, especially in the Spring of 2013. This was the first indicator from user research which changed the underlying scope of the project. Up to this point, we were naturally focused on a desktop-centric approach due to the complexity of the customer account section while accommodating mobile through responsive design for the marketing front-end. After finding more than 70% of customers were likely to hit the site from their phones, we effectively switched the entire project to a mobile-first approach.
While we didn’t have quantitative data to show it, our findings also uncovered a significant portion of the customer base were non-native english speakers. We didn’t ask customers in our user research, but in interviewing the stakeholders, i.e. store managers and associates, they cited as high as ~30% of customers at certain store locations cannot speak english at all, and come in to store locations to pay their bills in cash. In fact, a noticeable portion of issues fielded through customer support had some language barrier (in addition to typically being an older customer).
This meant our design had to accommodate a portion of users who weren’t going to be able to read or understand most of the text on screen (in addition to any potential vision issues associated with a moderately older audience). So we planned to focus on simple language and labels, and a heavy iconography/image-based creative strategy.
Personas should be typical and believable, but not stereotypical.
Once we finished gathering all of the data and finally started aggregating characteristics and behaviors, we emerged with 3 user profiles (we used this term synonymously with persona), which were direct reflections of the observations and data we gathered throughout the research process. We then broke out the behaviors in to segments that cross-references business opportunities we had defined earlier on with the main stakeholders.
At this stage, we’re able to break down specific reasons why certain personas come to the site (i.e. the user’s motivations), and the specific features we plan to develop or enhance to meet the users goals.
We refrained from including any additional demographic characteristics within our personas which didn’t increase our understanding of the behavior model or motivations for our users, so things like gender and ethnicity were left out, but general characteristics like age groups and ESL were utilized and emphasized through the profiles.
If the data is not conclusive or the characteristic is not important to the design or its acceptance, we prefer to err on the side of gender, ethnic, age, and geographic diversity.
In the end, user personas, founded on qualitative research and observation of real people, provided a common design language that lead to a successful redesign and development of the site. Customers enjoyed an enhanced and intuitive mobile experience that was simplified and easy to navigate. The client enjoyed a month-over-month increase in mobile traffic of +160% and year-over-year increase of +290%.
