To make authentic personas, consider how your user is feeling
Make sure emotional and behavioral context is not lost in your personas
“How do you think our users feel, after they’ve been told they have cancer?” My mentor gave me an emotional gut-punch right after rejecting my personas. “Because that’s probably why many of our users are coming to this application.”
Fresh out of school, I had tried to follow UX best practices for creating standardized, thorough, and otherwise neutral design personas. In other words, I was creating personas as a description of their “good day.”
That wasn’t what our users were going through. Some of our users accessed our application just after the worst day of their lives. The simple fact that I hadn’t captured their emotional state properly meant these personas were nice but useless.
Your project probably won’t involve extreme emotions, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore your user’s emotional, behavioral, and environmental contexts. Making sure to capture those in your personas is crucial in understanding the minds of the people you’re designing for.
To do that, make sure you include one simple but powerful question in your persona creation: “How is the user feeling?”
Creating Goal-directed design personas
There tend to be several (mostly) standardized questions that many designers ask themselves as they create personas, which tend to be reflected in the sections they create for them.
These include things like:
What are the user’s goals?
What are the user’s frustrations?
How much technology experience do they have?
What brands/influences do they like?
What’s a brief biography of their fictional life?
What tasks are they trying to accomplish?
Etc.
As a result, we are often more concerned with what the user intends to do on the website than how they feel. However, asking “How is the user feeling?” can yield many vital insights, one of which is capturing user motivations in specific goals.
To illustrate this, let’s imagine you’re designing a food delivery application like UberEats. This seems like there would be no emotional aspect to this, but consider that people are probably using this app because they’re hungry.
Exactly how hungry are they? Are they ordering in anticipation of lunchtime? Did they binge-watch something, and they should’ve eaten 3 hours ago? Or perhaps they’re coming back after a night out, and they’re tired and a little drunk (in addition to hungry)?
Considering these sorts of questions tie into Alan Cooper’s goal-directed design methods, which uses personas to address different levels of user motivations. These can be combined with Don Norman’s cognitive processing model to produce three levels of motivations:
Visceral motivations: how a user wants to feel
Behavioral motivations: what a user wants to do
Reflective motivations: who a user wants to be
We tend to cover Behavioral motivations with personas, where the user wants to do specific tasks or goals. We also may cover Reflective motivations, where the user is transformed from a novice to an informed user (or perhaps an expert).
Considering how we want our users to feel, though, requires us to do one crucial step that many people skip over: understand what they feel before using our product. We might not consider this with personas, but understanding it is critical to ensure we have realistic and authentic personas.
Someone ordering food in anticipation of a large meeting probably might be in a neutral emotional state and able to accomplish things efficiently. On the other hand, someone who wants food after a long night out partying before falling asleep is probably not in that same neutral emotional state.
Grouping these two users in a single persona will often hide these user motivations and may even cause misalignment between designer and user. However, figuring out how to address this may only take an additional step or two.
Creating a persona that captures the context
Making sure that your personas reflect visceral user motivations often starts by revisiting any data you already have.
Gather or revisit emotion and behavior data in user interviews or tests
Emotions and behavior are often gold mines of information, especially in user interviews or testing, but you might not have picked things up at the first pass. Users might have clicked (or not clicked) a particular button, but it’s also very likely that they had some emotions about the current (or your competitor’s) designs that support a specific process.
Now is an excellent time to consider that. What were your user’s initial reactions to what they saw (or what they currently work with)? If you don’t have that sort of data, one quick and easy way to gather that data is through something like a five-second test.
Build a spreadsheet
It’s best to capture these emotional or behavioral aspects in a spreadsheet or other software to make sure you write things down. While you might remember some stuff from user interviews, forcing yourself to externalize what you know makes you capture everything adequately.
Synthesize what matters
Going through your past data might give you many things to think about, but keep focused on what might matter for your persona. The main goal is to think about how a user wants to feel. This means considering how they currently feel (before using the product) and how they will feel afterward.
You don’t have to consider every emotional state that participants are likely to feel: consider 2 or 3 powerful emotions that will likely impact how users use your product. This is important because facts alone aren’t enough.
Storytelling with data
One of the things that you must remember is that when we create design artifacts, we’re not just creating facts: we’re telling a story.
It’s often not surprising that personas are often paired with another tool, storyboarding, to talk about the scenario and how the user will react in that situation.
However, a well-written persona helps us storyboard better with careful attention to the emotional state. The path that users take may not be as straightforward as you might think: I learned early on that many cancer patients avoid too much information, especially if it causes discomfort. In contrast, others want as much information as they can find.
Properly capturing the emotions that your users may have before even starting with the actual product will be an essential step to make sure that your personas are a realistic and authentic representation of your users.
Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer, Design Writer, and Data Visualization advocate. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.