How to create personas based on science that actually work
Personas are a concrete representation of underlying group personality traits clustered together in an abstract individual so that we may better understand the needs of a particular population segment. This is a pretty complex definition for a persona. However, this definition is justified as personas themselves are attempting to represent something incredibly complex.
It is quite difficult, if not almost impossible, to obtain a personality profile of one single individual let alone to create a persona based on not one but multiple groups of people. Even worse so, most personas are poorly designed artifacts that neglect the data of decades of research within the experimental sciences. So if you want to establish a persona that actually works, it then might be best to base it on years and years of research. Although many people in the Americas shrug psychology as a science of as something trivial and unreliable, the world however responds to this domain of science quite differently. In fact, research within personality psychology is actually so powerful in the real world that it has influenced major elections across the globe by profiting of people’s behavioral tendencies, as seen in the Cambridge analytical scandal. If unfamiliar to the reader, this scandal refers to the British company “Cambridge Analytica,” which developed a psychological personality profile of unknown Facebook users to tailor advertising wording towards target voters. Although I am expecting readers to uphold the highest ethical conduct when craving personas, I am nonetheless going to explore the topic of scientific personas in greater depths in this article through the lens of modern personality psychology.
Personas and their actual function
“Personas are a way of embodying and empathizing the lived experiences of our fellow people through their own lens”
Why on earth should we bother to create personas, and why would we have science involved in it? Well, that is relatively easy to answer. Engineers, developers, and product managers do not represent and frequently fail to understand the people they want to serve. This is not meant to be an insult; it is just incredibly difficult to understand people who are different from us. Research has reliably shown for example, that the nervous system of a highly extraverted person is differently wired, and thus modulated by other neurotransmitters (in this case likely the dopaminergic system) than that of someone who is not extraverted at all. In fact, we quite literally often tend to look at the world differently. This does not mean that I might see the glass as half full, whereas you as half empty, but rather that we actually attend to different things in the same environment. You, for example, might look at various beautiful men or women within the visual landscape. In contrast, another person right next to you with a different personality profile might only attend to threatening things, such as a barking dog or a scary man in the corner of the street. If you guys would talk to one another, you’d be perplexed at how much the other person might have missed. This goes as far as to confirm the popular statement that most of us live in our own bubbles.
One of the reasons is some of the limitations of our attentional systems and our foveal vision however, I could get into the physiological and cognitive constraints that result in this phenomena, but for the sake of the reader will dispense this idea for a later date and thus only will include some material in the appendix section for further studies. Instead, I am proposing that personas are a way of embodying and empathizing the lived experiences of our fellow people through their own lens. This will help both companies and customers and hopefully society at scale to produce things, ideas, and systems that are helpful and usable to the user.
Psychometrics and the big five personality traits
The behavioral sciences, i.e., psychology, cognitive sciences, and so on, have been grappling with the fundamental question of what behavior is and what mechanisms drive it. The literature on personality psychology is incredibly complex. On one end, touching the neurobiological underpinning of perception, while on the other end, also being a reliable predictor for the political sentiment. Now it is evident that no one person is the same; however, at large, it becomes much easier to cluster personality traits into a stable spectrum of behavioral patterns. As most natural phenomena, so do personality traits fall into a normal distribution (see above). Although statistics might scare many people off, this distribution simply reflects the reality that there are extremes of both ends of a tail. For instance, the average height of an American male is about 5.9 feet, so within this distribution, most people fall close or semi-close to that average. Yet, as we all know through our personal experience, there just simply aren’t that many people tailing on the extreme end of both ends such as 3 foot 2 male and a 8 feet 11 male (tallest man on earth). The same goes for intelligence; some people are incredibly dull, some extremely bright, whereas most of us are probably positioned somewhere in the middle of the intelligence spectrum. Similarly, research has shown consistently personality traits are also distributed among the population in this way (independent of race, ethnicity, and gender). Most people are about average in extroversion. Only a tiny proportion of the population is highly introverted or highly extroverted.
There are many different theories of personality psychology, such as Jung’s Myers Briggs or Eysenck personality inventory. However, the most reliable tend to be the big five personality traits. Scientists basically used a complex statistical analysis to cluster thousands of words representing personality into five robust domains of personality. This just means that similar words such as outgoing, life of the party etc. are best represented as the word extroverted so that participants can answer the question more quickly and efficiently. The five personality domains are best memorized by their acronym OCEAN openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. All of these five traits consist of a high and low end of the spectrum, such as high in extraversion vs. low or high in neuroticism or low in it. As mentioned before, most people score moderately in each category, however, at the level of the individual, we might observe idiosyncratic tendencies. This research catalyzed into a wave of literature that explored the tendencies of each of the five traits in depth. For instance, there are six facets of the dimension openness alone, such as fantasy, active imagination, sensitivity, and preference for variety. If you analyze them deeper and get a better grasp of your customer’s tendencies, your company might avoid the precipice of doom.
How to create a scientific persona
To obtain a reliable personality profile, a psychometric practitioner has to administer and analyze a set of psychometric tests to establish a reliable profile of the person of interest. If your company serves a segment of customers that are primarily interested in video games or in fitness activities, it might be useful to know their profile so that you can develop better products for the. The best way to administer such tests is to use the IPIP 50 item set questionnaire by Goldberg. If you are short on time, the abbreviated 10 item BFI- 10 version developed by Rammstedt and John tends to be still 70% reliable. It is still good to have a person who understands personality psychology on your UX team to get the most out of your data. The inventory is comprised of items such as “I feel comfortable around people” and “I am interested in the meaning of things” and lets the participant score them on a scale from 1 to 5. Alternatively, some companies, as before mentioned Cambridge Analytica, used Facebook data, Twitter feeds, and personal information to establish such a profile based on the language used by the user. This can get quite interesting if you think about it, yet I will also refrain from commenting on this subject matter here. Recent studies even went as far to suggest that eye tracking data can reveal personality traits. Furthermore, the ChicagoCHI conference discussed using physiological and eye tracking measurments to detect perosnality traits, which can be viewed in full below.
You can find a link to the big five questionaires here: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/.
One thing I consistently observe in most personas are funky unreliable and subjective personality traits such as internet person, feeling, and loyal. As cool as they sound, what are you as a designer actually going to do with this? There is no research, nor clues, nor evidence about the validity of any of this, let alone a way to establish an understanding of our users. Instead, if you do have a reliable personality profile, you might be able to scan the academic literature on the personality traits of interest to pick the fruit of countless years of research. You can get as deep as you want about your research process by reading studies about for instance eye tracking studies that compare viewing behaviors of extroverts and neurotic people to find out what your audience might be more prone to attend to (i.e., look at) so that you can design better products, or to look at their overarching biologically rooted motivations and preferences to build a persona that is representing a actual person.
However, as reliable as the big five are, there is still room for improvement and creativity. In subsequent articles, I will discuss some of the alternative methods we might employ to discover and create better personas. These will discuss some of the Jungian psychoanalytic theory, the role of actors, writers, and gifted literary people to build incredible personas. I hope that you as a reader will use this information ethically to improve, not worsen, the fabric of our society.
References
Berkovsky, S., Taib, R., Koprinska, I., Wang, E., Zeng, Y., Li, J., & Kleitman, S. (2019). Detecting personality traits using eye-tracking data. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–12.
Carlyn, M. (1977). An assessment of the Myers-Briggs type indicator. Journal of Personality Assessment, 41(5), 461–473.
Fatke, M. (2019). The personality of populists: How the Big Five traits relate to populist attitudes. Personality and Individual Differences, 139, 138–151.
Fischer, R., Lee, A., & Verzijden, M. N. (2018). Dopamine genes are linked to Extraversion and Neuroticism personality traits, but only in demanding climates. Scientific Reports, 8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18784-y
Gawande, A. (2004). The bell curve. The New Yorker, 6, 82–91.
Johnson, J. A., Briggs, S. R., & Hogan, R. (1997). Handbook of personality psychology. Elsevier.
Raad, B. de E., & Perugini, M. E. (2002). Big five factor assessment: Introduction. Hogrefe & Huber Publishers.
