Personas vs Jobs Stories. Which one for product design?
I was very comfy using user personas to get a clear vision of who will use the product, the interface, and focus on making visuals based on the insights through these personas.
And it has a lot of sense, you can’t argue that this is wrong and most relevant if you are just learning UI/UX design this method is for sure one that you will learn.
Even in the industry is pretty common working with personas when we need to know the user and design based on their needs and interests.
I was one that used this too! Until I found something more logical, something better with greater outcomes — it’s Jobs Stories and it’s an adaptation from Intercom in their work process that comes from the methodology Jobs-to-be-Done.
Jobs-to-be-Done is pretty old and definitely not new (almost 30 years old), perhaps that is one reason that isn’t popular in today’s workflow.
But Intercom (a big and great company) use this methodology for everything in their operations from strategies, sales, customer support, design to everything — and they had taken the duty to bring some kind of updated version of Jobs-to-be-Done applied for today’s hottest products (aka software products).
They say in their ebook that instead of explaining all the Jobs-to-be-Done process, they want to show some of the most valuable lessons they have learned over the last five years as they have applied the theory to Intercom’s product.
The main focus of Jobs-to-be-Done is to start developing products on tasks (job) that people need in their lives or want to improve — it lets you focus on making things people actually want.
And one thing that comes relevant in this methodology is the Jobs Stories.
What makes different Personas of Jobs Stories is that one focuses too much on things like attributes that actually don’t have a real impact or value in the design decisions.
Personas let you see that people are really different, with really different goals. But the similarities are far greater than the differences, and across everything you can imagine — race, age, gender and so on.
Meanwhile, Jobs Stories focus on motivations, what makes a user do an action — something a lot more relevant for design decisions that will lead us to the right path of the product features and how it looks.
When we use user personas it can turn out of control quickly with a large of diversity on personas and makes us separate users based on things that actually in the majority of cases won’t make sense for our product features.
User personas will put limits for your market reach and audience — will put restrictions in your design solutions — by focusing on attributes rather than motivations and outcomes.
How Personas fail
“Personas look at roles and attributes. Jobs-to-be-Done looks at situations and motivations. Personas explain who people are and what people do. But they never fully explain why people do something. And why people do things is far more important.” — Paul Adams. VP of Product at Intercom
So now with this perspective user personas looks pretty bad 🤔 — I have to admit it, I was like wtf why I haven’t heard about this before, it has a lot of sense!
Job stories work in this way
This would describe a job in contexts and situations.
“If we understood the situation in which people encounter a problem to solve, understand the motivation for solving it, and understand what a great outcome looks like, we were confident that we would be building a valuable product for our customers.” — Paul Adams.
Example of a product that helps car salespeople secure loans for customers:
- When car salespeople and their customers interact with each other via the product…
- …customers want to feel like they can trust the organization, process, and the salesperson.
- …so clients will feel safe entering their financial information into a process.
It’s pretty easy to see that this approach is better than personas, and I definitely will try this Jobs Stories for my next project and hope that I can integrate it into my workflow.
I see more relevant User Personas for smaller projects like a specific website for a niche. But for bigger projects like a web app or mobile app with a large audience then it is more useful Jobs Stories.
If you want to learn more in-depth about Jobs-to-be-Done and Jobs Stories I suggest you read all the ebook from Intercom. It’s a valuable piece of information.
What do you think about Jobs Stories?
