The persona paradox
Empathy is the one irreplaceable skill in user experience. If you lack empathy, all you have is analytics data and user testing to guide your practice. Data alone can only give you the what, never the why, let alone the how. Yet user experience as it is practiced today is a radical test of our empathy. The question the user experience designer must constantly ask herself is “what would I think and do if I didn’t already know the things I know.” Pretending ignorance when you have knowledge is challenging. The user experience designer already knows the right button, the right journey, the right flow, because she is intimately familiar with the product. What we attempt to do in user experience is recapture a state of “not knowing” so we can create accessible experiences for people who don’t know what we know. This is asking a lot of our empathy.
We solve this problem by making up personas for people who don’t know what we know. It’s easier to be empathetic when you have an idea of who you are supposed to be empathetic towards. We put a lot of thought and attention into creating useful personas. I’ve read many different theories about how to create effective personas. Some suggest personas should be based on real people. Some insist that personas should always be aggregates. Everyone agrees that personas need to give off the ineffable “feel” of actual humanity in order to work properly. You cannot empathize with straw men, clichés, or stereotypes. You might condescend to meet their needs, but you don’t feel their truth.
But very few personas end up feeling very human, even when they are based on actual humans. This isn’t the fault of the UX specialist, who certainly approaches the creation of personas with good faith and a genuine desire to establish empathy. The failure is predetermined by the UX process itself. We begin by establishing business goals and project goals based on the product or service we are trying to sell. These goals overwhelm every other aspect of the process, especially our attempt to empathize with our users. We struggle to think of our personas as human, rather than as means to an end.
The Inductive Error
Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying strong evidence for the conclusion. When a religious person insists that God must exist because it says so in the Bible, they are employing inductive reasoning. While inductive reasoning is pretty common, it is generally seen as a pretty crappy way to make an argument. Deductive reasoning on the other hand, reasons methodically from a set of premises to arrive at a conclusion. When Sherlock Holmes says “once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”, he is employing deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning, properly employed, is considered more objective because it’s only goal is the truth, not the confirmation of a pre-held belief.
When we create a digital experience, the premises we are operating from are the goals and the conclusion is the creation of a digital experience to accomplish those goals. It’s self-fulfilling, like all inductive reasoning. That’s fine, because that part of the process isn’t really based on any logical argument. We need to build something because we need to build something.
The problem is that the process of user experience is structured like a logical argument. Once the goals are established, we create a new premise — our personas. Then we reason from our personas to create the rest of the experience through journeys, sitemaps, information architecture, wireframes, etc. This process looks a lot like deductive reasoning. The only problem is that the personas have been pre-shaped by the goals. It’s a deductive hotdog encased in an inductive bun. And that, my friends, just isn’t Paleo.
The user experience specialist is tasked with a process that will end with the creation or recreation of some digital experience. The conclusion of the process is predetermined. The website or app or touchscreen interface will be created. We don’t start by identifying a potential need. We start with identifying potential users of the thing we have already decided to create. The persona’s humanity is sublimated to our goals from the outset.
Despite this, many user experience specialists still do a good job of understanding and empathizing with actual users and their needs. The best warning sign I know that your goals may have overwhelmed your process is when your personas are infatuated with laundry detergent.
Unnatural Focus
Personas are frequently written with a weird focus on a specific industry, vertical, or product. A persona created for a laundry detergent website may imply that the choice of laundry detergent is the defining characteristics of a human being. But laundry detergent, like most consumer purchases, is actually low engagement. The personas are written with product-specific monomania because the project goals require that people be incredibly invested in the product. If I need sales of my laundry detergent to go up 20%, I will write personas that are interested in laundry detergent and open to buying more. Otherwise, what’s the point?
It helps to think of a persona as a hypothesis. In writing a persona, the user experience specialist is hypothesizing about her users. She is making guesses about their demographic and psychographic profiles. The fact that this hypothesis may be biased by an unnatural focus on the product category isn’t unusual. In most scientific research, the researcher is biased in favor of his or her hypothesis. The academic wants his theory to be proven correct. The medical researcher wants her treatment to be proven effective. The entire point of research is to expose a hypotheses to objective testing, to allow the hypothesis to stand or fall on its own.
Unfortunately, user research compounds the bias towards over-emphasizing the importance of an industry. When you test anything you influence the results. If I ask a user to look at a laundry detergent website, they will feel compelled to offer opinions about laundry detergent generally and laundry detergent websites in particular. We need to recognize these opinions for what they are — paid responses to predetermined stimuli demanding an unnatural degree of attention. In psychology, the unconscious desire on the part of test subjects to understand the purpose of research and please the researcher by confirming their hypothesis is called demand characteristics.
University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Orne pioneered work on demand characteristics and how to prevent them from biasing psychological research. While Dr. Orne’s work is accepted in mainstream experimental psychology, many user experience testing companies have a policy of “transparency” with test subjects about their clients and goals. While this feels more honest, it compounds demand characteristics. The test subject wants to make you happy. When you tell them who commissioned the research and why, you introduce massive bias into their responses. Insisting that this type of research reflects your users’ actual level of engagement is a profound failure of empathy. If you pay someone to care and then you ask if they care, guess what? They’re going to tell you that they care.
The UX specialist will also struggle to be objective when writing personas. She is compelled by her job to focus on a specific industry and vertical to an unnatural degree. She is surrounded by clients or coworkers who share this unnatural focus. She is collecting research results that appear to confirm her unnatural focus. But the UX specialist must resist the gravitational pull of this bias. After all, it is difficult to empathize with a user that demonstrates a bizarre fixation on laundry detergent.
Yeah, but…
If personas were simply awful, it might be easiest to abandon them altogether and look for a better way to bring users to life. While I think that many personas are written pretty badly, they are written badly for good business reasons.
The UX specialist is tasked with achieving conversion (however defined) in one very narrow experience, industry, vertical, and product. She can’t write a novel about every user group in order to place the product in the proper context of the user’s life. At best, she has a page to bring this person to life and explain what they need from the product. She’s not writing the story of a life. She’s writing about the persona’s specific needs and motivations as they apply in this circumscribed area.
Most user experiences are engagement-driven. Meaning, that users are choosing to come to a website or download an app or interact with a touchscreen. Even if they aren’t normally very interested in laundry detergent, they are curious enough to visit a laundry detergent’s site. While the unnatural focus of a persona on a product or category wouldn’t make sense in the grand scheme of their life, it makes more sense in the specific context of a specific user choosing to visit a specific website.
These caveats might help us to understand why personas are written the way they are. But that doesn’t change the fact that personas that have been biased by project goals struggle to inspire much empathy. Maintaining an awareness of where personas typically go wrong will help us to correct for these biases and build better, more actionable personas.
Building Better Personas
Here are three tips for writing less-biased personas. I’d love to hear other ideas in the comments below.
- Naturally, the first ingredient to creating personas needs to be a healthy degree of empathy and self-awareness. If you write a “loyalist” persona who will purchase your product “regardless of price”, you’re not being very realistic. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve written those exact words on a persona before. It’s a corporate fantasy to imagine that we have a core group of maniacally loyal customers who would continue to buy at twice the price. Perhaps this is true if you’re selling fentanyl. The rest of us should assume that our product or service may be — at best — preferred despite moderate discounts to a competitive product. The key here is to know your biases and write personas that could actually exist in the real world.
- When I was working at Deutsch advertising, the data strategy team had a great way of talking about target audiences. They wouldn’t reduce them to their purchase decisions in a single category. They would create a universe of all of their preferences across many different categories. Thinking of someone as a consumer of Lexus, Marriott, Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latté, Anne Taylor, Pottery Barn, and Serial podcasts, creates a picture of that person in our minds. Consider writing personas that outline purchases and preferences across broad and unrelated categories. While this may feel a little consumerist, we live in a consumer society. For better or worse, we are somewhat defined by our purchase decisions. You know the woman who listens to podcasts in her Lexus while sipping her Pumpkin Spice Latté, even if you don’t actually know her.
- Consider creating an engagement/enjoyment matrix for each of your personas. This is a chart with engagement on the x-axis and enjoyment on the y-axis. This should reflect how this user feels about your particular category. If you’re selling laundry detergent, that should show low engagement and low enjoyment. Buying health insurance is probably high engagement but low enjoyment. Planning a vacation is high engagement and high enjoyment (for some people.) It’s important to be honest in plotting the persona’s engagement and enjoyment. Even if you wish that users enjoyed visiting your website, you should try to remember that researching your breakthrough herpes drug is probably more of a chore than a pleasure.
