stereotypes

Meet Luke. He’s a designer, can you tell? It’s a bit of a giggle, because I know at least a dozen designers who could be Luke. Hey, I fit several of those criteria myself.

From a marketing perspective these things might be useful to know. But nothing on that page helps me design something that will work better for Luke. For example the owner of a coffee shop might look at this and decide to combine the most common 3-element drinks so instead of ordering a decaf soy latte, you just order a “Designer” coffee. Luke might love this, but he might also never go there again because he feels judged.

And there you have the key issue with personas; they’re stereotypes. They don’t encourage you to know and understand people, they encourage you to judge, and make decisions based on what you think you know about those people.

That’s fine when we’re making fun of designers, who are well paid and in relative positions of power and privilege. It’s much less fine when you’re doing it to people who aren’t. Then it’s just ick.

Take people with accessible needs

In all the research we’ve done in the transport space, and all the people we’ve spoken to who are in a wheelchair, EVERY SINGLE ONE IS DIFFERENT. They have different likes and dislikes and backgrounds and opinions. How they experience the world and navigate public space is different, and nuanced. The fact they’re in a wheelchair is just one element of their lives.

There are commonalities that you can design for, of course, but understanding the nuances is what helps you design more inclusive spaces. And you can’t possibly understand that from a conglomerate version of wheelchair users pulled together in a single page with some jaunty comments and a cute image.

When personas go bad, they’re harmful

True story. Someone walks past the project space, stops to read a persona on the wall and says “wow, this one sounds like a dick”.

Judgement. Not empathy.

Obviously the way the personas are described can play into that. The worst one I’ve seen had a woman who would “walk across the platform and swing her hair and strut in her high heels and look around to see who was watching.” Maybe they were trying to bring the character to life, so you felt something for them. But you can’t possibly understand the people you’re designing for with a caricature.

Personas can emphasise the differences that people have, which might be great, but not if it’s used to profile or misrepresent people (which it too often is). And if there are things people disagree with it can drive a negative response, leading to a greater divide rather than building empathy.

So what can we do instead?

A better way to build empathy is stories of real people, who are willing to share this way. At Meld we’ve done that really effectively with videos of different people navigating spaces, for example. That works as a communication tool and an empathy building tool.

We’ve tried mindsets and archetypes, with mixed success. The mindsets we developed for public transport recognise that the same person may make vastly different travel decisions today and tomorrow depending on the task at hand, who they’re travelling with, the weather or any number of other factors. This at least brings the why in — traditionally personas are all what — but it doesn’t help much in terms of design.

There’s no shortcut for getting human input into your design work. You need to do the hard yards and try things out and iterate them when you see what works. You need to watch your users — as many and as varied as possible — interact with what you’re designing and find out why they behave the way they do and get them to help you make it better. It doesn’t have to be onerous (see my previous post about five ways to prototype, for example) but it does have to be done.

Please. Let’s not put any more personas out into the world.