Move over User Persona, the Product Persona is here
In my last article, I gave a step-by-step guide on how to create a Product Persona. In this article, you read the backstory behind creating this method.
A Product Persona reflects the personality of your product as if it is an authentic person. Not the superhuman your marketers display it to be.
For this process, I chose Nike because Nike is very clear about their brand values. I made up a hypothetical case in which I’m asked to revamp their website.
Beliefs, goals, and motivations
If you work for an existing brand, this is the easiest part. If your company doesn’t have a clear mission, vision, and values, you should address this first. You use your company mission, vision, and values as the basis for the beliefs, goals, and motivations of your Product persona.
Nike’s mission, vision, and values are: “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. — *if you have a body, you are an athlete.”
“Our mission is what drives us to do everything possible to expand human potential. We do that by creating groundbreaking sport innovations, by making our products more sustainably, by building a creative and diverse global team and by making a positive impact in communities where we live and work.”
If Nike was a real person, I would describe them as somebody who is interested in innovation and believes anybody with a body is an athlete. Their life goal is to help other people increase their potential through sports. And, they like taking the lead and thinking of new ways to reach its goals.
You use your company mission, vision, and values as the basis for the beliefs, goals, and motivations of your Product persona.
After reading this, I started associating people I knew with this profile. I thought of as many people as possible. What do they all have in common and what not? This evolved the concept of the product persona to a person. This helped me with the next part ―defining a personality.
Step one: turn vision, mission, and values into interests, goals, and beliefs.
Personality
Personality is a person’s general style of interacting with the world. In contrast to emotional states, people’s personality traits are relatively consistent in the span of their life.
Defining the personality of your product is difficult for two reasons.
First, because you have to be realistic. Being realistic means you also have to define less desirable traits. When I created my first Product Persona, I automatically tried to find the most positive traits and minimize the negative traits.
Second, because you want to create a personality that is unique but relatable at the same time. It can’t be a random patchwork of personality traits. It needs to be believable.
Transition here? (So, how can we make it believable?)
Pioneer in personality psychology, Gordon Allport, identified 17.953 English words that describe personality traits. So don’t start completely from scratch, use predefined personality types which you adjust to your situation.
In ancient Greece, philosophers wrote about classifying people by personality types. They determined two pillars of temperament: hot vs. cold and moist vs. dry. This resulted in four humors or combinations of these qualities.
Fast-forward to the 20th century to Raymond Cattell. He was a psychologist who spent many years researching personality traits. For the 17.953 adjectives describing personality, Cattell distilled this down to 170 traits that he found logically different from one another. After much research, he ended up with 16 traits.
Later other researchers condensed these down to five traits, now famously known as The Big Five theory. The Big Five is usually the standard for measuring personality in academic studies. However, I didn’t use this for my Product Persona.
Writing this article I got sucked into a vortex of different personality theories — from Carl Jung to Carl Rogers, and from Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — to the DISC assessment. Loads research is still needed to be done on every one of these theories. When it comes to the science of personality nothing has been set in stone yet. Not even exactly what personality itself is.
When it comes to the science of personality nothing has been set in stone yet. Not even exactly what personality itself is.
My advice is to take personality theories and assessments with a pinch of salt. Let’s be honest, although I do truly believe defining the personality of your product is important, it will always be a subjective exercise. Create a persona with a personality that your team and your users can empathize with. But, don’t get hung up over whether it is scientifically valid or not.
“So how do I define the personality?” you wonder. I let other people do a personality test about my product, Nike in this case.
I gave five people the description of Nike’s goals and beliefs but changed the name. I varied between the use of John and Jane to compensate for any possible gender biases. Then asked them to do the personality test. The test I used, was the 16 personality test, which is a combination of Myer-Briggs and the Big Five. It’s not an academically accepted test, but it does the job. Side note: for fun, I did the test for my own personality and it was freakishly accurate.
This was the result:
Three people had ‘the Protagonist ENFJ-A/ENFJ-T’. The website described them as “charismatic and inspiring leaders, able to mesmerize their listeners”. Two people had ‘the Consul ESFJ-A’, which are described as “extraordinarily caring, social and popular people, always eager to help”.
My biggest fear was that the result would be 5 different personalities. I was happy to see that this wasn’t the case. Although it’s not one definitive personality, the Protagonist and Consuls have many overlapping traits. In fact, the only trait which they differ on is: intuitive vs. observant trait.
Interesting side note: the two people that had John in the description, had the Consul as a result. The three that had Jane had the Protagonist as a result. The sample is too small to draw any conclusions, but think it does illustrate why it’s important to vary in gender.
For the summary, I chose three of the most relevant strengths and weaknesses. Nike’s strengths are:
- Charismatic: know how to capture an audience, and pick up on mood and motivation in ways that allow them to communicate with reason, emotion, passion, and restraint.
- Strong sense of duty: a strong sense of responsibility and strive to meet their obligations.
- Good at connecting with others: a true team player, social, comfortable and well-liked. They have a strong need to “belong”, and have no problem with small talk or following social cues in order to help them take an active role in their communities.
Nike’s weaknesses:
- Overly idealistic: can be caught off guard as they find that, people fight against them and defy the principles they have adopted.
- Inflexible: sometimes push their own beliefs too hard in an effort to establish them as mainstream.
- Too selfless: bury in hopeful promises, feeling others’ problems as their own and striving hard to meet their word.
Appearance
This is the hardest part of the process.
By defining visual characteristics, you are in danger of maintaining or even enforcing stereotypes. Our brains naturally have prejudgements about other people, because being nuanced about everything would drive us into a permanent state of cognitive overload. However, stereotyping is problematic when it restricts you from seeing a person as a unique individual or, even dehumanizing them.
In About Face, Alan Cooper, the pioneer of user personas, explains:
“Don’t confuse persona archetypes with stereotypes. Stereotypes are, in most respects, the antithesis of well-developed personas. Stereotypes usually are the result of designer or product team biases and assumptions, rather than factual data.”
Based on this advice I was not able to create an archetype because I was working with subjective data. My first instinct was to not add visuals at all, but it felt contradictory because I wanted to create a realistic person you can empathize with.
“Stereotypes are, in most respects, the antithesis of well-developed personas.” — Alan Cooper
We are visual creatures and visuals help us understand information better. I decided the best solution was to create a semi-realistic illustration. This way I had some control over their appearance.
Back to Nike. Many characteristics are equally distributed among the world population and not specific to one group. For example, the goal of Nike is to help people through sports. Wanting to help people is universal and not specifically related to age, race or sex. In fact in Survival of the Nicest by Stefan Klein, he writes that scientists have discovered that helping each other has been the most important force in human evolution.
Scientists have discovered that helping each other has been the most important force in human evolution.
This raises the question: how do you choose a characteristic which is equally distributed over everybody?
The answer is: you let a randomizer choose for you. Yep, it’s that easy. When sharp questions arise and the atmosphere gets tense. You say, “I apologize if it offended you. A computer chose it randomly”. Everybody puts their popcorn away and then gets on with life. No drama here today, folks.
Making use of a randomizer helps to make a less biased decision
This was my process:
Gender: I used a list randomizer for this. I filled in a list with ‘man’ and ‘woman’. The generator chose ‘man’. I will admit I had to restrain myself from not doing the generator multiple times to get my desired answer (woman). My tip is to do this with two people together to avoid cheating.
Age: I used a number randomizer for this. Looking at the goals and beliefs, I found it should be somebody who is relatively young but old enough to be a responsible adult. I decided the range should be between 25 and 35. The randomizer generated number 31.
Skin color: I wanted to use the same number randomizer as above and use Von Luschan’s chromatic scale, which ranges from 1 to 36. However, the translation of his scale -which I think was made of clay- to hex color code gave some pretty questionable results. I ended up using the Fitzpatrick scale instead which only ranges from 1 to 6 and was created to estimate the response of different types of skin to ultraviolet light.
Making use of a randomizer helps to make a less biased decision
Based on these randomly chosen characteristics, I looked for matching photographs.
I also made some subjective decisions based on the goals and personality defined above. In my mind, I combined a tech entrepreneur with an athlete. This is the end result:
Final thoughts
After doing this process, I decided it would have been easier for the rest of the process to first choose a gender, age, and name for the persona. This is why in my step-by-step guide, recommend doing this first.
As a UX designer, I always prefer making choices based on data. However, creating a product persona involves many subjective choices. This results in many challenges related to human biases and ethics. One way to deal with these challenges is to create a product persona as a team. Let everybody in the team first create it by themselves and then compare the results. Also, appoint one person to be the devil’s advocate so that groupthink is minimized. Lastly, making use of a randomizer can help to make less biased decisions.
Read the step-by-step guide here. I also wrote about why it’s important to create a Product Persona here.
If you have any thoughts about optimizing this new method, please leave it in the comments below.
