Interaction personas: why, what, and how
Understanding the physical, environmental, emotional and mental state of the user at the moment of the interaction.
Through my research project on how to defuse negative self-talk I found that tools as personas and empathy maps were missing something between the design part of the project. While they were useful for the creation of journey maps, they lack the contextual relevance through the later stages of design.
Looking at different way to use the gathered information about the users and the missing pieces, I designed a new tool, called interaction persona. The tool focuses on the users and their environment in the moment of the interaction with a product or service.
Interactions personas help to understand and empathise with the user’s mental state and understand the context in which the user interacts with a product or a service. Since it is known that the cognitive load, emotions and environment influence people’s behaviours and attention span, it is important to understand in which situation the interaction occurs to formulate an informed decision on the interface, data input approach, and information system.
What makes it different from personas and empathy maps?
Starting from the data gathered in user interviews and primary research, personas and empathy maps help teams to empathise with the user, in particular while analysing the entire journey of the user in a given product or service. While persona and empathy maps describe a general state of the user, they lack of details in the touchpoints, when the interaction between the users and the product or services.
Interaction personas focus instead on the touchpoints and the user’s mental state and context in these specific moments, pinpointing crucial elements that could help improving the product.
Interaction personas take the knowledge on cognitive and behavioural psychology and focus on seven elements: emotional state, environment, willpower and mental energy, attention span, touchpoints, moment visualisation, and inclusion.
A brief look at behavioural theories
Interaction personas help to create an overview of the variables that can influence behaviors to happen.
The Fogg Behavior Model, a model that look at how and when behaviours occur, shows that there are three elements that must converge at the same moment for let it happens: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger.
Interaction personas help to understand the user context in the moment of the interaction and to consider all the elements that could influence user motivation and ability to take an action.
Moreover, Interaction personas help to look at what could be an internal and external triggers in that specific moment. Internal triggers are driven by emotions and beliefs, other people and our memory. External triggers, on the other hand, are informations or cue in our environment that lead us to take actions.
Once collected in the same places these informations will be easy to understand for designers, and to them to define a specific moment and design a better interaction.
How to use interaction personas.
Interaction personas come into play after having created the journey map and identified touch points and opportunities.
You can develop single or multiples interaction personas depending on the journey map. It is important to base the data on the information gathered during the primary research and not let assumptions bias the process.
As mentioned before, interaction personas focus on seven elements: emotional state, environment, willpower and mental energy, attention span, touchpoints, moment visualisation, and inclusion.
Emotional state
What is the emotional state of the user at the moment of interaction with the product or service?
Looking at the users emotional state helps to understand how they will act and which emotion are triggering the interaction allowing us to reinforce or defuse such emotions.
Environment
How does the environment influence the product/service usage and the user?
Especially while interacting with a mobile device, environment is competing with users’ attention. Can we use it in our advantage? Are there some way to use environment elements for trigger an action? These are the kind of things you need to take in consideration while designing products or services.
Willpower and mental energy
What level of mental energy does the user have in the moment of interaction? What’s the level of the user’s cognitive load?
A high cognitive load lowers the willpower and the mental energy of the user impairing both motivations and ability to act; less mental space leads to lower abilities to get things done and to a higher stress perceptions during the interactions.
Attention span
Is the full attention of the user on the product? Is the user actively looking at what we are providing?
As Linda Stone writes in her article on continuous partial attention, “we pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything”; this influences our ability to actually get things done. By focusing on the available attention span in the moment you will be able to set clear constrains to facilitate less stress on the user during the interaction.
Touchpoints
What are the touchpoints for the interaction?
Think about all the possible scenarios and highlight all the touchpoints where the interaction could happen. Consider wearables, mobiles and tablets, in person interactions, desktop and TV or voice interaction through a call. Each touchpoint has its own pro and cons.
Look for inclusion
Have you looked at different people impairment?
Disabilities could be permanent or temporary and situational. Thinking of these situation will help to allow everyone interact with your product or service.
Visualise the moment
Draw the situation of the interaction and try to tell a story about.
Look at the situation, imagine it and draw it. It doesn’t need to be perfect but it is important in order to allow the entire team to fast visualise the interaction moment.
Conclusions
With the advent of Human-Centered design, people are put at the center of the design process. Understand the needs of the people we are designing for leads to the creation of a better solutions. Interaction personas bring the Human-Centered design approach in the interaction design, helping to understand and empathise with the people that will interact with our products or services.
