Proto-personas, useful or not?

One of the themes we often revisit with our clients is the need to think HUMAN scale. To fully deliver solutions that meet the unmet needs of people, not technology, we must build a deep empathy with the people we’re designing for. A key way to achieve this is by creating personas.

The question is whether it’s better to do this retrospectively based on user research and insight, or to create ‘best guess’ personas based on assumptions and then validate later?

Firstly, to deliver great experiences, we need to represent the voice of our end users at all times. An excellent way to do this is to try and visualise who they are, what are their motivations, their behaviours and their unmet needs. Sketching out what they look like, giving them names, feelings, goals and motivations, also helps them come to life. This method also helps us empathise with the people we’re designing for, and it unites the stakeholder team behind a single vision of our users, customers or employees.

Secondly, we need to bear in mind the purpose of the project goal. Are we innovating a new product or service for our clients, or are we looking to understand their markets by defining commonalities in their target demographic? These goals are different, but they both use personas in different ways. Knowing which type of persona is key in leveraging the right data that drives the solution.

One type of persona defines outliers, people who do things differently, which helps our designers understand how to best design solutions that meet those ‘extreme’ needs. Whereas marketing initiatives are primarily looking at grouping people into segments based on their shared needs, so that marketing communication is more efficient and effective.

We can create personas in one of two ways;

1) By carrying out upfront research, interviews and observations and then distilling these down into a single persona or a series of personas that will best represent the people’s unmet needs.

The option is the open minded approach that we as design thinkers favour, as it starts with user insight and helps us develop personas that match real users. This works in situations where a vision of the user is already clearly defined and understood in the team. This allows us to preselect people for observation and interview and acts as a selection mechanism for our future research effort.

2) Creating a sample persona (or proto-persona) based on shared assumptions of who the end users are and then subsequently conduct user research to validate our assumptions and refine our persona based on real data.

The proto-persona approach is part of the Lean UX methodology which is oriented towards enterprise systems. It helps clients segment user groups based on stakeholder assumptions, innate organisational understanding of existing users and on defined job roles within an organisation. This pre selection allows our teams to generate proto-personas that reflect these assumptions and helps focus research efforts and resources more accurately and effectively. These personas are then validated against real user feedback and updated over time in an iterative way.

One of the key advantages of the second approach is it gets stakeholder buy in, at an early stage, and it helps create momentum from the outset which is then carried over into the ideation and prototyping phase. User research and validation can then follow as we fine tune both the assumptions of the end user and the product or services that will meet their needs best. It can also help us map the real users against our assumptions and define our empathy work and behavioural research.

In conclusion, it is important to choose what type of persona your team is creating and what ‘job’ you’re looking to achieve by using the persona tool. Using a marketing persona approach in an innovation project will not yield good results as it will limit the scope of the product or service concept. And, using an innovation persona in a marketing initiative will yield very narrow user segmentation data that won’t allow campaigns to connect with the biggest audiences to communicate effectively.