Mindset over matter: a new design trick for your toolbox, part three

In this three-part series, UX lead Chiara Lino and Senior UX Designer Giulia Bazoli, from our Oslo studio, take an innovative dive into an ongoing design thinking problem: the trouble with Personas. How do Personas engage our own biases? What are the alternatives when researching and iterating users of products and services? Part one examined the antiquated nature of Personas. Part two introduced an alternative, “Mindsets” thinking. Part three, our conclusion, discusses how you can implement the Mindsets thinking into your own projects.

By Chiara Lino and Giulia Bazoli

Part 3: Thinking about Mindsets in your own work

Keep ’em fresh

Mindsets are supposed to be a constant work in progress, evolved and refined at every iteration of the research, and reexamined at any new discovery. They are much more abstract than Personas, so they can be built upon and applied to different contexts. Make sure to:

• Avoid treating Mindsets as the end goal of your research phase. There’s no end goal to research simply because there’s no reason to stop informing your design process with external data, be it quantitative or qualitative. Use every chance you have to understand users better, and feed that knowledge into the Mindsets you have created as an opportunity to define them better and keep them alive within your team.
• Recruit a truly diverse sample of users when conducting qualitative research, which includes using different channels to recruit. Specialised agencies are fantastic and convenient, but their database has an inherent bias. Social networks, be it a digital one or your old-school real life connections, tend to keep you inside your bubble. Get crafty and creative when it comes to recruiting to make sure your research process is both ethical and effective.
• Validate through testing, and keep track of everything. If you design for a specific Mindset, test the resulting solution as soon as possible to make sure your interpretation of needs, behaviours, and reactions is correct. Tweak both the solution and the Mindset(s) according to your findings.

Embedding Mindsets within the organisation

To avoid being forgotten in a drawer, or only being adopted by the designers who created them, Mindsets need to become a practical tool used to promote discussion and decision making across a variety of the organisation’s rituals and processes. These can include roadmap prioritisation, concept and feature discussion and development, user research planning, design critiques, copywriting, etc.

Some pointers about how you might integrate Mindsets in your workflow, and as a common reference point within the team you work in:

• Communicate internally to create a shared language within the organisation when it comes to referring to users, for example, when you’re fostering empathy and contextualising decisions around the product.
• Understand what to prioritise in the team’s work. For example, when deciding what concept or feature to work on next, a Mindset that needs more support, or a Mindset that has been deprioritised lately, could be chosen as a focal point for next year’s iteration, either to compensate for lack of attention, or to open up new opportunities.
• Designing: tackling big picture tasks. For example, when developing a concept or a feature, each Mindset should be used to help you and your team understand and consider how to create a solution that meets the different Mindsets’ needs, as well as approaching more granular work. For example, when writing UX copy, Mindsets could be used as a guide to offer different types of information that caters to diverse needs in terms of savviness or readability.

Some examples of questions to ask as a way to practically use Mindsets and promote a dialogue around them in the workflow:

• What would users [specific Mindset] need in order to better deal with this step in the process (for example, retrieving documentation from their employer)?
• How could we adapt the service we are creating in order to cater to the diverse needs of each Mindset?
• How would users in this Mindset react to the new concept or feature?
• How would this Mindset evolve or shift through the use of this concept or feature?
• What types of information should we share with each Mindset when describing the new concept or feature?
• What tone of voice should we adopt in the solution to make all Mindsets feel spoken to?
• Which Mindset would struggle the most at this step, and what might we do to help?

Are Mindsets always useful?

As with any other design tool, Mindsets are far from being perfect. To make sure we keep evolving and improving them, we have to maintain the same critical eye that we have towards any other tool. We need to be the harshest critics of our own tools. Here are some of the things we want to actively observe as we integrate Mindsets into our process:

I have a favourite Mindset.

As with any other tool, we have to be mindful of falling into the trap of “getting too close” with a specific Mindset, and therefore designing by only considering that set of needs. This might be because one specific Mindset reminds us of ourselves (hello, similarity attraction bias) or because they are more interesting from a business perspective for the organisation (hello, capitalism). Another issue might be designating one Mindset as the aspirational state that we want all users to reach: Remember, that’s not a Mindset but a goal, and no user is ever in the perfect state, because no real person ever is. To spread interest and attention evenly across all the Mindsets, we recommend allocating an advocate for each Mindset in the team, to make sure they are all represented. Try rotating them every few weeks to make sure each advocate doesn’t fall too much in love with the Mindset they are advocating for.

Mindsets are a constant work-in-progress.

From a content perspective, Mindsets are meant to evolve over time through continuous research on end users in order to provide additional or more refined information and insights. From a format perspective, Mindsets are good only if they can provide enough insight and flexibility to support ongoing and new initiatives within the organisation. For this reason, the format needs to evolve to match the needs of the people and teams who will be using them. We recommend testing them as a tool with the team that will use them, and iterating according to their feedback without compromising the integrity of the insights.

Now that I have Mindsets, I can finally trash my Personas.

Even though Personas are problematic in perpetuating biases and representing users as static and one-dimensional, they might still serve a role as a design tool. For example, in projects that target a very specific demographic, or for empathising with specific roles and responsibilities within an organisation. Another approach could be to use Personas alongside Mindsets. For example, multiple Personas could be developed from one specific Mindset to unpack and think through the different types of people who could find themselves within that Mindset.

Conclusions

If you got this far, let us part ways by taking one more minute to list a few conclusions that represent, for us, both a summary and more general learnings from this process:

• Mindsets are a way of thinking! They push us to empathise with a way of feeling, rather than a person. Each Mindset can be spread out across multiple users rather than specific to a single individual.
• If this has led you to reevaluate all the work you’ve done on your Personas, wait before you trash them. Try instead to unfold/expand/open them up, for example by removing names and ages; abstracting the emotional state this person is in; writing down some different people this could apply to; and consider how they might evolve over time. If needed — and we’d recommend it anyway as it’s always a good exercise — go back to the raw data in your research and try applying new lenses to it now that you might have a different outcome in mind. You could also consider using Mindsets and Personas as complimentary tools, as we state before in the article: Mindsets as a broader, more high-level approach, and Personas as some more granular examples of specific users that might need to be represented.
• Good understanding of users is rooted in continuous research. And good research starts with good recruitment. Recruitment for research is key to creating solid Mindsets, along with any other design tool — we need a diversity of voices to make sure we identify with diverse experiences. And we shouldn’t stop there! We need to keep doing research and keep iterating on our Mindsets. Research is continuous, like design.

Ultimately, Personas were just a starting point for this journey. If there’s one important learning we will bring with us for the rest of our careers, that would be to slay the auto-pilot effect we’re so often a victim of. Avoid pre-packaged, off-the-shelf design processes. Challenge processes, methods and tools as we would challenge any outcome.

We’re never just designing the product; we are designing the discipline. This is not about ONE tool, but rather about challenging and reframing how we do things continuously.