Personas are now “Experience Roles”
In life we wear a lot of different hats, play a lot of different roles. Sometimes when we get ready to do different jobs we put on different uniforms, gear, outfits and top it off with a hat. When we think about these jobs to be done, we can think about different experience roles that people play and the jobs they hire for. Instead of talking about these in terms of personas we can simple talk about what these experience roles are and what are they hiring for.
As we start to look at how we talk about various experience design practices(methodologies) we can take a step back and rethink how we approach them to make sure we are really connecting with our teams and those around us on a human level and do it without sounding like a know-it-all.
Remember, these words and phrases are not magical, canonical or holy. In fact take them, and change them, as the immortal Paula Abdul was so fond of saying, “Make them your own!” The point is to evaluate how you talk with your teams and people in your company. Then determine if you can make it more inclusive, co-operative and reduce the barriers for everyone to participate in the design of the experience.
I’ve heard personas described as, “A relatable snapshot of the target audience that highlights demographics, behaviors, needs and motivations through the creation of a fictional character. Personas make it easier for designers to create empathy with consumers throughout the design process.”
Let’s start off with the name Personas. Doesn’t this sound all mysterious and scientific, like the word dossier? Dossier doesn’t even look like it sounds. The definition is “a file containing detailed records on a particular person or subject.” I know, it has French roots.
“French, bundle of documents labeled on the back, dossier, from dos back, from Latin dorsum”.
My point is the average Jessica/Joe wouldn’t talk about a dossier without feeling at least a little twinge of pretentiousness…and you probably have to say it several times with a really bad French accent, right?
Anyway, back to Personas. Even the definition of persona sounds pretentious.
plural personas [New Latin, from Latin] : an individual’s social facade or front that especially in the analytic psychology of C. G. Jung reflects the role in life the individual is playing.
Go ahead…read it through several times to really let it sink in. There’s no way you would use this definition to explain what a persona is, and if you have to explain what it is aren’t you already creating work that doesn’t need to be done?
The Rest of the World Doesn’t Live in Your Mind
I know sometimes it feels like there are a lot of voices in there, but hopefully there’s just one…okay two, — your mother berating you for all the bad things you do with your life. Just kidding, my mom is my biggest champion. She has everything I’ve ever written in a scrapbook and her favorites on her refrigerator door (I think she secretly only brings them out when I visit).
For years I told myself everyone, or at least most people understand what it is that I mean when I say persona. For instance, “let’s look at the personas” or “that’s the grandma persona” or “I don’t think the builder persona would do that.” I expected everyone I was talking about to have the same mental model of what a persona is and what they are meant for. You know what? They don’t! Not every developer or team member has the same understanding of how personas are developed, how they are attached to customer journey maps (now Customer Experience Maps) and how they can be useful in defining stories in agile backlogs.
If you were to talk about Pam, the manager of a store or Jim the sales agent and the fact that they represent various experience roles, we are much more likely to understand what it is we are after. After all, that is the purpose of all this, right? We want to understand what Pam is feeling when she does her job, what her environment is like, and how she interacts with various people, processes and technologies throughout the day. We need to know what her tasks are, what permissions she needs to a system, and what information and tools she needs at her disposal to help her do her job. She helps represent a certain set of needs that we should account for as we design and develop experiences.
The Definition
Let’s try to reframe our definition of what a Role is and what we need it for when we have these conversations with our PO’s, teams and stakeholders.
A Role is someone that represents a group of people, their backgrounds, the things they do, and what makes them do the things they do. It helps describe their routine tasks.
We create these experience roles so we can organize the research we’ve done to better understand them and have common words to talk about them with our teams.
They create people that represent the need for certain experiences and features, and help us make sure we can intelligently talk about them as we build experiences for them.
We can use them to help us get into character as we’re trying to understand their needs and environment as we research, do design work and create stories to bring our experiences to life with the developers on our teams.
Role + Goal = Experience (Scenario/Feature)
I have to credit our Director of UX, Rob Thomas for this next piece of thinking as he helped me get here. I think it’s brilliant and indicative of what I’m trying to accomplish in this series of articles about how we approach designing experiences. It breaks down what can be complex and arduous work into a simple and approachable equation. He said, Role + Goal = Scenario. I looked at that and tried to make it a bit more approachable as we talk about building experiences and evolved it to Role + Goal = Experience.
Let’s take each part of the equation piece by piece. Role, this can be confused with a permission (user, admin, manager, etc.), but here we’re talking about what is the role of this type of customer in the Customer Experience Map? This Role is really their Persona. What unique attributes represent this section of your customer base that can help you identify needs as you seek to craft stories, designs, development? What value can be delivered to your customer through features or working code/products that help them achieve their goals.
Next is goal, what are the day to day (UCD) tasks does that Role play each day. Whether you like User Stories or Jobs to Be Done your identifying the needs of the customer, their wants, their desires, their goals.
Taking that Role and adding the Goal helps define what experience you are going to create. Call it a scenario, feature, app, micro-journey, whatever. Those first two pieces of Role + Goal help you empathize with the customer to define what experience you will build.
Remember that experience can be as small as interacting with the sound controls of Spotify, adding quantity to your Amazon order or adding a new photo in Instagram. Experience can also be the whole experience, but the point is the Role the customer plays plus their goals equals the experience you can design for them.
How to Create Personas or Experience Roles
There are endless resources on the web for how to create personas or experience roles. Again, that’s not my goal here. My goal is to help us change our approach in how we talk about this methodology/practice/activity with our team members and others we work with to be more inclusive and less prickly.
Here are a few of my favorites.
NNg
-https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona/
-https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona-scope/
Next Up: Taxonomies are now “Experience Organizations”
In life, it’s important to learn how to organize things. I learned this from an early age and have enjoyed it throughout my life. I think this is one reason I love designing experiences. You take all these messy-middle thoughts and start to try to make sense of them, move the bits and pieces around until you can find a semblance of order. You can feel the pieces flow, you almost feel happier as each new piece falls into place like a puzzle nearing completion.
Taxonomies, Information Architecture (IA), Labeling, Search, all these are helping us to define the basic architecture of the experiences we build. Let’s explore more about these things as we move from Taxonomies to “Experience Organizations”
Articles in this series
This series seeks to reexamine the approach and vocabulary of UX design methodologies and translate them into experience practices (minus the UX and design terms) that help us to be more inclusive, align with our teams better and interact with the full spectrum of humans as we design experiences.
How to discuss experience design and not sound like an arrogant arse
Sometimes we struggle connecting with our teams and it may just be our approach and interaction.
Personas are now called “Experience Roles”
Personas really look at the hats or roles that people play and the things they do that make them different from others.
Taxonomies are now “Experience Organizations”
In life, it’s important to learn how to organize things. Let’s look at how we can do this with our teams.
Is HX simply about doing UX right, or is it more?
Human experience design is a more holistic approach to experience design.
How co-designing can reduce your rejection and stress levels
You’re not a magician, cowboy, ninja or superhero; stop trying to be one.
