Highs and Lows of Modeling People

Personas have always been an interesting yet controversial topic in today’s User Experience field. Many of us, designers or marketers, have created countless personas from school projects to everyday professional practices. Painstakingly detailed, creatively written. It’s an important UX deliverable, without which your work can often be disqualified.

Although we all know that personas are meant to be a powerful tool to help communicate the real user needs, behaviors and aspirations in design processes as to represent a larger segment of users, we almost never really ask the questions: do we really need a persona and are we creating and using the personas in a justifiable manner?

A persona is a people model; a people model is an informative representation of a group of somewhat similar individuals. As a result, personas often lose the richness and the unique characteristics that belong to each person being represented and can even be caught in the pitfall of stereotyping.

When a stereotype is triggered, our decisions are often biased, we default to see affirming information and as a result have our pre-assumptions of others taken over their true behaviors. In fact, studies show that we will in general view all individuals from other cultures or subgroups that we don’t belong to as excessively similar, known as the illusion of outgroup homogeneity. (Ishii, Kitayama, 2010)

When it comes to personas that rely on demographic variables, we tend to reinforce existing stereotypes. Specifying our persona’s age, race, education, gender and even giving a literal image of whom being represented, will be a second opportunity to activate a schema. Personally, I am not a big fan of adding too many details to a persona, rather only specifying those critical attributes that will have a role in the story to be told. As the persona is not the only artifact that we create in the innovation process, we can have those demographics info sit within the segmentation data which will play a more important role in marketing than designing.

Alternatively, we can put more emphasis on the psychographic information of our personas and always encourage 2nd and 3rd validations from the real user groups to help justify the credibility of these people models.

Most importantly, make sure you are clear about the project scope and the questions your team need to address before you even go down the route of creating a persona.

Ishii, K., & Kitayama, S. (2010). Outgroup homogeneity effect IN perception: An exploration with EBBINGHAUS ILLUSION. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 14(2), 159–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-839x.2010.01339.x