Design your products around mindsets, not just user personas

How to define where your customers sit on a vast scale of motivations.

The problem with user personas alone is that they are often times simply a description of the top-of-the-bell-curve average person, identified from a lineup of assumptions. Not all of your users will resonate with the sentiments of the average person. So this begs the question:

How can you be confident that your personas embody your entire user audience?

A persona description often goes something like this:

You could create an infinite number of combinations of these personas, or stop when you reach a point where the personas you’ve created satisfy the average person from each group you’ve chosen to split your audience into.

Then, what tends to happen with personas once they are defined, is to allocate a persona to a customer journey — when in reality, a persona can partake in many different customer journeys, and a defined customer journey can be taken by more than one persona. Once a map has been created with your main personas in centre stage, the user experience then starts to take shape.

The harm with this approach is that you risk neglecting users who are equally important, who cannot find a…