Looking beyond user personas
Looking closely into MuSo’s persona building methods and how it was not enough.
Before getting into the debate about needing user personas (or not) it’s important to address context, tools and the intent.
As behavioural designers and researchers, we’ve all dealt with projects that require different kinds of “persona” tools depending on how and by whom they are going to be used. Sometimes we create informal personas in our minds and sometimes we create more communicable, formal ones. The tools and methods used by MuSo differ slightly from other projects because our goals and intent were very different.
Intent
On the design team of a children’s museum, the need for user personas was extremley specific. Here are some of the reasons why I carried out a long (ish) process of creating personas for the team (and consulting teams) at MuSo.
- Design Tools:
User personas are fictitious yet realistic representations of your target users. They act as multipurpose tools used to drive many important development tasks such as: the creation of user scenarios, feature generation, and feature prioritization. User Personas help navigate design. Created out of user data, personas take on a format that is meaningful and creates user empathy among the development team, ensuring that our users are always the focus of our efforts.
References and examples — IDEO’s learning personas in action, The Coral Project, Firefox User Type : North America
Context: When I joined the MuSo Design team, I was the only one on the team that was not based out of Mumbai (Location of the museum). To even start the first steps of designing for children, it was important to be introduced to their unique way of thinking.
2. Preconceived notions:
We all have the same tendencies to be captivated more by concrete instances than by abstractions and generalizations. User personas helped the team move past all of the preconceived stereotypes that may have been created unknowingly.
Context: MuSo consults a panel of 25–30 children from schools all over Mumbai. Sometimes we generalized this children’s panel, we realised that we needed more insight into the lives of children from lower income groups and look beyond our existing group of children. Persona interviews/activities (which I’ll touch upon shortly) helped us reach out to these groups of children.
3. MuSo Pillars:
User personas helped guide the implementation of the three pillars MuSo is based on. Using the background of a child and the knowledge gained by user personas, we are able to create services and experiences that empower the child (Boldly child-led), ensure MuSo is an inclusive space (Radically inclusive) and are able to understand what every child’s reality is (Rooted to reality).
4. Building Team Vocabulary:
The main benefit of using personas was that they created a common, more precise vocabulary for describing a certain type of user and thus focused design efforts on a common goal. In meetings, the persona’s name acted as shorthand for the full set of attributes, desires, and behaviors that need to be considered when making design decisions.
Context: Before personas, the team would be referring to a child — say Ram. When talking about Ram, we were not on the same page about his attributes, likes and dislikes. What personas did was give us a common language when designing for “Ram”.
How did we do it?
- Identifying people to reach out to:
In a city with a population of more than 20 million people, how does one identify potential users and stakeholders? Its important to reach out to a range of people from different backgrounds and locations for ideal results. When I started the process of creating user personas for MuSo I broke down the process into a couple of parts. Here’s how I went about it:
- Listing down types of schools according to their board (ICSE, CBSE, local boards)
- Identifying diverse economic backgrounds
- Creating a plan of action: Since the user set is so large, it might make sense to divide the tasks.
2. Interviews and surveys:
Engaging with users to make personas means you’ll be working with real user tasks, traits, and pain points. A combination of google surveys, phone calls, video calls (group and one on one) were conducted. This process unlocked learning and improved interpersonal bonding.
It’s always helpful to create a questionnaire. While creating the questionnaire try to put yourself in your respondent’s shoes. Consider whether the question is open-ended, or may push the survey-taker in a certain, favorable direction. This questionnaire consists of all of the doubts and biases we come to the project with.
Here is some interesting reading material that is relevant in this phase- Avoiding Biased Questions, 5 common survey question mistakes that’ll ruin your data, The Deadly survey Questions
3. Challenges and activities:
When data and insights from the aforementioned steps began to come in, I realised that a big chunk of data was either too preachy or the children were saying things they thought I wanted to hear. Some children were also unable to articulate their thoughts. I started sending out quick thought provoking questions to them and asked them to visualise their answers (and email/whatsapp them to me).
“Museum in the future will be built by all of us kids”
“Museums in the future will have classes in the forest, we will learn to make treehouses and keep our books there, sometimes we learn without books”
3. Analyzing and grouping:
Once you gather some data to analyze, it’s time to identify trends. It’s time to take a closer look at tagged data to see if overlap emerges naturally. When it was time to finally shape personas, all of the data was put into an excel sheet (thanks google).
This is where we started clubbing personality types and learner types that might come to the museum. This is also the step where certain behaviours and needs of children started to emerge.
I started understanding why different children needed the museum. It was interesting to study what MuSo might mean to different children.
Context: For some children MuSo acts as a friend that guides them in the process of solution making. For others, MuSo is a safe space for children to reflect on their choices and life. Multiple examples like this began to emerge and some overlapped too.
4. Communication: Persona has no value if it’s not distributed well within an organization. All team members should be familiar with primary Personas. It’s always a good idea to present them to the team formally or do quick roleplay activities where members of the team step into the shoes of each persona.
Okay, we’ve got personas now….what’s next? Why does there have to be a next?
Don’t just do whatever the users tell you.
Personas represent large customer groups, but what do you do if your customer base is too diverse and expands into different segments? While personas serve as a great starting point, we might notice certain limitations that arise with it. These limitations may also hinder the future design of things.
I began to think about tackling this obstacle.
Do we throw out user personas?
The answer to that is yes and no.
YES.
There are two layers to explore when we look at this. When working on a design team that consults teams all over the world, user personas are needed to communicate layers of information and provide a certain level of environment setting for these teams based out of the country. It becomes especially important to have user personas in this case because they explain basic realities to teams abroad and help set context.
NO.
As a design researcher, my colleagues and I needed much more than a routine, lukewarm persona(s). There were tonnes of intermingled characteristics and behaviors. We needed to understand types of learners, collaborators and visitors in a museum setting.
A week after creating personas, I started the process of adding to the existing personas deck. I kept exploring possible ways to use all of the data I had collected. Through analysis I realised types of learners, collaborators and visitors but wasn’t quite sure how to take them forward. I thought about design prompts/how might we question and re-analyse the data. Thus we began to explore the scope of a persona card game to make the process of design richer.
I was able to create three decks of cards that were used during the design process and conception of various exhibits. Essentially these cards expanded possibility and challenged the team when in use.
To conclude, I don’t think there is a black or white answer to the question “do we need user personas or not”. Every organisation, every team and every designer has different reasons for needing (or not needing) user personas. It is important to identify the intent and let that lead the process. In the next blog, I’m going to go into depth of MuSo persona cards and the layer they added to the design process. I’ll look into types of prompts and design questions (how might we….) that challenged us during the process of creation at MuSo. Stay Tuned :)
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