Personifying the Planet 4 Archetypes
Stewart, Evangeline and Webster
Throughout the course of a project there is an ebb and flow between generating new ideas, synthesizing and making them actionable and effective. Months ago we generated a variety of archetypes. Then we synthesized them into our initial set of three. During our work week in February, we realized that our archetypes weren’t actionable and effective. Planet 4 needed to revisit which users to focus on. Revisiting a topic like this is not abnormal. The truth is that this “state of iteration” will be constant until final release, but we’ll talk about that another time.
In the Discovery phase, we came up with a handful of archetypes that might represent the right kinds of people to focus on for the initial development.
Prior to the Concept phase, we refined them and dot voted to come up with an initial set of archetypes to test. This set of archetypes included “Stewards”, “Connected Evangelists” and ‘Frontline Defenders”, whose real life counterparts needed to be interviewed to in/validate and socialize them as design tools.
Realizations and Synthesis
In the Concept phase, the combination of numerous rounds of interviews and the challenge of working towards a specific product deliverable taught us a few things about these archetypes, we had to:
- create a new archetype for web producers
- de-prioritize the frontline defender archetype
- develop relatable user stories
As Laura described in a previous post, we created the “Webbies” archetype to account for the many individuals responsible for producing content across Greenpeace websites. Another key reason to make this archetype a priority was that as the product team started to grow and meet deadlines, a separate track dedicated to these users became important. We didn’t want to design the product around the same key archetype in parallel and then work backwards to mind meld and correct. Thus, creating and developing the concept around the “Webbie” archetype allows us to acknowledge these individuals and work more collaboratively with them on the product.
The decision to de-prioritize the frontline defender archetype for the first release came once we realized that this archetype would likely find themselves doing many of the things Stewards and Evangelists might do. The Webbies archetype, on the other hand, has a different user flow. The design team felt the need to put some energy into their potential flows as soon as possible.
Taking the archetypes one step further with user stories will hopefully help us to move from abstract conversations to concrete user flows. With that in mind, we’d like to introduce you to them.
Meet Stewart “the Steward”
Stewart is married with two kids. He regularly notices news stories about things like carcinogenic sunscreen ingredients and runoff from a nearby factory. He has ongoing anxiety about his family’s health.
Meet Evangeline the connected “Evangelist”
She lives at home and attends a local college. She’s a heavy social media user and thinks of herself as the “conscience” of her group of friends.
Meet Webster the “Webbie”
Webbie is in charge of the website for Greenpeace India. He isn’t super technical but knows how to copy and paste code and make good use of visuals. He usually doesn’t have a ton of time because he’s juggling many different tasks.
Curious to see which user scenarios will be created from these personas for the Creative Concept of Planet 4? Do you have any doubts or comments about the selection of one or more of them? Do you want to generally show your excitement or disappointment? Leave a comment below, send a message to the Planet 4 team or tweet at #gpp4.
Or simply watch this space, the Creative Concept is on its way.
