A New Approach to Writing Personas

Sarah Harvey
RE: Write
Published in
2 min readFeb 12, 2018

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with personas over the past six months. I’ve enjoyed researching and writing them, and I see how detailed personas can be crucial for creating empathy. But while detail is important, adding demographic detail can be tricky. Sometimes we get caught up in demographic details, and instead of designing with empathy, it feels like reinforcing a stereotype.

At UX Strat last year, I heard Jake Mitchell speak about using “jobs to be done” at CarMax — the first time I’d heard someone talk about using jobs to done theory in design. This approach made so much more sense.

It’s finally time to start thinking about personas for our semester-long RE: Studio class, and instead of trying to define our audience by demographics, we’re starting by identifying their motivations and goals — more specifically, the motivations and goals related to our product.

My group is tackling the UX of spaces, and we decided months ago that we wanted to build something physical that would foster human interaction. What will create will most likely have something to do with a place to sit, and will be outside in a public space.

Already, that’s a broad spectrum of people that could potentially interact with our creation. Demographics don’t matter as much as questions like how much time these people have and where they are going. We’ll likely have multiple personas, and focus on segmenting based on differences in how they connect to their environment — not whether they’re male or female, or 24 or 65.

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RE: Write
RE: Write

Published in RE: Write

Thoughts and stories from Studio, a product design masters program at CU Boulder, dedicated to re:working, re:designing and re:imagining the world of design and technology.

Sarah Harvey
Sarah Harvey

Written by Sarah Harvey

Graduate student in CU Boulder’s Strategic Communications Design program. Focusing on product design, user research, and accessibility.