A step-by-step guide to agnostic UX personas — free downloadable
Don’t boot off personas just yet create age, gender, and location agnostic personas instead.
It’s no secret the design industry is starting to loathe personas, Chris Thelwell over at InVision asks if personas are ruining your product others are opting into the Jobs-to-be-done framework. This means people are out there making personas without conducting user interviews or research in the first place 😨. In fact, the industry is substituting UX research with personas and this needs to stop. Yes, just about every definition on the web will tell you a persona is a fictional character that represents an ideal customer. The persona may be fictional but the ideal customer is real. So you need real insights and real data. As a designer, every decision you make is to benefit the user and needs to be backed with hard cold irrefutable proof/data of why the decisions you make are correct that is achieved through quantitative and qualitative research. This allows you to gain enough information and identify opportunities in order to craft compelling experiences.
What are personas?
In UX design a persona is an ideal user someone who uses your product or service. The person you are designing an experience for. The person your product or service needs in order to achieve business goals, reach success metrics and meet user goals.
What are agnostic user personas?
Agnostic user personas can be age, gender, or location agnostic, they have gender-neutral names in order to avoid stereotyping or ethnocentrism, and are mostly used to focus on the pains and gains of a user.
In my opinion, we need to be designing user-friendly interfaces and websites regardless of age and gender. You should already be designing with accessibility in mind even if elders or disabilities are not in your market demographics. It’s our responsibility to make the internet easy to use and engaging.
When to use agnostic user personas?
Avoiding demographic information such as age and gender is not always the best choice in a project. If your product is for 5-year-olds or if it’s an all-female product then agnostic personas will do more harm than good. According to a study conducted by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, women notice and use different aspects of a UI than men. Women, for instance, are more prone to notice people and faces, whereas men are more drawn to dynamic color choices. (Collins)
· Use age agnostic personas for example, if the youngest users are in their late teens and the oldest users are in their mid-thirties than the user age gap is larger than 15 years
· Use gender agnostic personas if demographics are 50% Men / 50% Women.
· Use location agnostic persona if there are more than 5 countries or settings (city, suburban, outlands, etc.) in location demographics.
How to create user agnostic personas?
Step 1: User Research
Get insights about the organization, the market, the users and the product you are designing for. There are many methods to do this, here are my favorite:
· Read comments on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
· Read customer reviews on Trustpilot, Google, or app store.
· Look up recent news articles about the company.
· Schedule User Interviews
· Conduct User Surveys
Here are a couple of links to get you started on your research:
UX Research Methods and the Path to User Empathy starter tips for UX Research.
Nielsen Norman Group Research backed articles and design best practices
Statista Statistics and facts for just about every industry and over 50 countries
Step 2: Define your personas
After you’ve done your research you will have tangible insights on your hands and this is when to use it. How many user groups or people benefit from your product or service? Develop one persona per user group. I start by naming my personas. I like to use gender-neutral names even if I set gender-specific demographics. This way the persona can be interchangeable if the name is Nico it can be Nicole or Nicolas depending on the scenario. I like one syllable names accompanied by an adjective or noun think Preppy Pat or Accountant Al these are easier to remember.
Step 3: Craft your personas
It’s time to analyze the data and statistics you’ve collected to answer important questions and develop your user personas.
Demographics: Who the person is gender, age, location, career, and education.
Is your audience 50/50 male and female? Use gender agnostic personas.
Is the generational gap larger than 15 years? Use Age agnostic personas.
Are your users scattered all over the world? Use location agnostic personas.
Goals: What the person wants to achieve when using the product or service and why he or she must achieve this?
Objectives: How does the person accomplish his or her goals? What does this person need to accomplish their goals? How does the person accomplish this within the product or service?
Capabilities: What are the technical skills of the person?
Behavior: How does the person feel and react? What are the person’s values?
Pain Points: What are the challenges the person faces? What are the person’s frustrations? What is the challenge the product or service intends to solve?
I like to answer these questions in a table format this saves time and I don’t have to worry about design or layout its just about the data.
Step 4: Empathize with your personas
Designing experiences comes down to understanding the challenge and understanding the people who have these challenges. To ensure you personas are realistic, reliable, and relatable characters for your product or service empathize with your persona I find empathy maps a great method to empathize with users. They are quick and easy and help align design and usability perspectives. Storytelling is also a great way to create reliable and relatable personas. Heather Salfrank gives a lot of insight on how to use storytelling in product design in her article Treating your product design work like it’s a Pixar movie.
Final Thoughts
Always ask Why, How, and What? Why does that button go there? What studies prove this? How does this affect my users? I don’t think I’ve ever used the exact same framework for personas on any project. This is what they don’t tell you: In UX not every project or product is the same, thus, your process won’t ever be exactly the same. Heck, like Stefanie Owens from IBM recommends:
They (personas) could even be oriented more around a Jobs-to-Be-Done type of framework rather than an actual persona, such as “_____ needs to _____ so they can ______.
Pro Tip: Think outside the box, get creative and know your methodologies.
What do you think about user personas? Yay! Or nay? Are there other new alternatives that work as well as personas? How do you feel about agnostic personas? Leave your comments below!
