User Archetypes vs. Personas
I was on a design strategy project recently for a top-tier retailer for which an agency had developed dozens of personas. The personas weren’t differentiated by behavioral attributes or measurable characteristics, only by their ages, personal stories, and features they were (purportedly) likely to use. The persona printouts were plastered all over the walls, but with time the ink had faded. The team told me that these personas had taken a serious amount of time (and budget) to develop, but were never used to guide design. This exercise obviously gave personas a bad name in that company.
Another national retailer I consulted with also had had personas created for them. I was tasked with creating profiles for the most valuable online customers, and create a design strategy with these profiles as a guide. One rule stated plainly at the outset: Don’t mention personas and don’t put that word in the deliverable. The senior management team wouldn’t endure another project with personas.
How did this perception of uselessness, and even outright hostility toward personas develop? Nearly a decade earlier I worked on a personas project for a leading company in the photography products and services industry, the team loved the personas. They brought them up in every major conversation where design issues were debated. They remembered their names for months during a massive new product effort. I still remember their names. What was different?
I think it was a matter of the foundation on which the personas rested. In the first two examples I used, the personas were simply personal, plausible stories that were invented on the basis of what was known about customers from anecdotal evidence. They were constructs that could not be measured or disagreed with. They were very logical and well-organized, and were used by their creators to propose numerous features and design changes. But they were hollow. The photography company, on the other hand, had decades of data that they were able to attribute to the personas. They knew these people from a numbers perspective, how many pictures they took, what they did with the pictures, how likely they were to produce new picture artifacts, etc. The personas were clearly segments of their target audience and they knew how many people those segments represented.
Despite my initial positive experience with personas back in the 1990’s, I promote a different, but related, construct to my clients these days, that of user archetypes. Some agencies use the terms personas and user archetypes interchangeably, but I think of them rather differently. The distinguishing aspect of all personas that I have read about in the popular literature is the individual identity and the matching personal story that involves the interactive domain in question. What distinguishes user archetypes is that they are archetypical, meaning they are the quintessential or most frequently observed example or universally understood type.
I have been in quite a few persona-creation sessions. The methods vary widely, from the most whimsical to others that match specific data points of interest. User archetypes, on the other hand, by the nature of being archetypal must rely on data of some sort to achieve that status. Reading through the popular design resources, I haven’t found a common understanding of how user archetypes should be developed, so I will describe the steps in the Usography process for creating user archetypes. Note that the steps described below are for the largest e-commerce projects with the biggest budgets for research. For smaller projects, we combine many steps and use the best available data. So each of the following steps is contingent upon the scope, goals, and budget of the project.
- Consult existing research
- Conduct ethnographic study or in-context interviews
- Determine needs, motivations, activities, resources, artifacts, etc. that are involved leading up to and following use of the web site in question.
- Determine the variables and higher-order concepts that impact behavior
- Use scales to characterize users more precisely
- Determine the range of values for all key variables in the population of users studied
- Look for qualitative evidence of correlations and dependencies between variables
- Create profiles that summarize values of these variables for actual participants
- Group participants based on shared characteristics and behaviors
- Create a user archetype profile that represents each distinct group.
- Measure the variables that define and differentiate the user archetypes in the population of interest more precisely using quantitative methods
- Finalize and prioritize user archetypes based on anticipated value to the company
- Develop a design strategy to engage and support each of the top priority archetypes.
- Track results, and refine the model
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com)
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