Rethinking personas

I often synthesise my user research into personas, which include gender and other demographics. While working on a product targeting women, I started wondering if the demographics and gender information are discriminative.

Photo by Frank Romero on Unsplash

The brief

How might solutions specifically empower female-identifying donors, inspiring gender equity across the giving ecosystem?

I learned that women donate more than men, more frequently and respond more to an empathetic concern. I reframed these traits to: I am designing for an empathetic person who wants to donate frequently. Does that equal being a woman? In my opinion not at all. As I wanted to be inclusive, I started challenging the fictional character with gender, age and physical characteristics. As personas can risk re-inscribing existing stereotypes (Marsden and Haag 2016), I wanted to explore other ways of summarising my research.

JTBD

Jobs-To-Be-Done completely drop personal characteristics, and some designers prefer this method over personas (Laubheimer 2017). They could however not be as effective as personas, in creating empathy for the user.

“While JTBD do include some key considerations about the emotional and social context of a user goal, they generalize them among the entire user base, and therefore miss that key sense of context about users, and lose the opportunity to create empathy among the design team.” (Laubheimer 2017)

As I used JTBD in the past, I started researching ways to create more inclusive personas.

Personas

Hill et al. proposed the concept of using multiple pictures for one persona (2017), to tackle gender bias. I was a bit skeptical about having one persona with both male and female pictures, so I researched other possibilities. I eventually came across a gender-neutral persona introduced to target gender bias and “promote attention to gender needs in a balanced way in the design process” (Lopes and Vogel 2020).

Gender-neutral persona

I wanted to try out this concept and synthesised my research into Charlie — a gender-neutral persona. I used a name that can be both male and female and focused on personality rather than physical traits. I also couldn’t find gender-neutral stock photographs, so I included an illustration rather than an image.

Charlie — my gender-neutral persona

Other tips

Personas should consist of an even mix of both attitudinal (e.g. motivations, beliefs, desires) and behavioural (e.g. tasks performed, the information sought, websites visited, web tools used) traits of users (Guo et al. 2011).

Guo et al. recommend enriching the persona with information about the flows or sequences of how users engage in various activities (Guo et al. 2011). Taking it back to my research, I included both current and desired journeys of how my users donate to charities.

Reflection

Having gone through the gender-neutral persona I am still not sure what is the best approach. While this is more inclusive, I believe that using pictures in personas is more powerful not only within the design team but in conveying user needs to stakeholders. In the future, I am thinking about trying the approach with multiple pictures.

References

GUO, Frank Y., Sanjay SHAMDASANI and Bruce RANDALL. 2011. ‘Creating Effective Personas for Product Design: Insights from a Case Study’. In Internationalization, Design and Global Development. 37–46.

HILL, Charles G. et al. 2017. ‘Gender-Inclusiveness Personas vs. Stereotyping: Can We Have It Both Ways?’ In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 6658–71.

LAUBHEIMER, PAGE. 2017. “Personas Vs. Jobs-To-Be-Done”. [online]. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ [accessed 29 May 2022].

LOPES, Milena and Carl VOGEL. 2020. ‘Gender Effects in Mobile Application Development’. 2020 IEEE International Conference on Human-Machine Systems.

MARSDEN, Nicola and Maren HAAG. 2016. ‘Stereotypes and Politics: Reflections on Personas’. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 4017–31.