Ask A Designer Round 6: Empathy in Design

User personas are one of the many tools a designer can use to guide the design process.

The intention of these semi-fictional representations of your audience is to aid in humanizing your approach and understanding who you’re designing for.

Thinking about the motivations, goals, challenges and preferences of your target can help in designing in a more user centric and thoughtful way – but are these useful?

In this round of “Ask a Designer,” we asked members of our design team about their experience with navigating user personas and how they remain mindful of empathy in design.

Question 1

How often do you create user personas?

Name: Irum Tariq

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: Creating personas is typically common when working on a new project or a large-scale initiative. Several factors contribute to this practice, such as budget availability, time constraints, and the need for personas given existing data. Ideally, personas should be created frequently and updated after significant market research activities, like surveys, interviews, or usability testing, as these activities reveal new user information. However, due to various constraints, personas are usually created only when embarking on new projects.

Name: Ram Kumarasubramanian

Title: Senior UX Researcher

Answer: In my 8 years of experience, I have created personas from scratch only on a few occasions. I have assisted in developing personas to support the establishment of a research team and utilized them to illustrate the typical day of our target users, providing valuable insights for the design process.

Additionally, I curated personas and developed broad archetypes (a higher-level abstraction of a collection of personas) to facilitate internal consensus on the user base for a platform I was helping build. These archetypes aided in aligning internal stakeholders and provided clarity on the objectives and obstacles faced by the end users of our platform.

Name: Sheyla Amaral

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: It’s not very common. When working on existing products, it’s typical for user personas to have been established at the start of the project. In my experience, I’ve encountered situations where the target users for these personas changed slightly, requiring a reassessment. For new products, the process is different, and the method for defining personas can vary based on the product’s goals, and I have worked defining some of them, which is an interesting and deep process.

Question 2

What methods do you use to ensure relevance when creating user personas?

Name: Irum Tariq

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: My process for creating user personas is straightforward. I begin by setting the objective and scope to determine why we need personas and how they will be used. Next, I conduct research using qualitative and quantitative methods. I recruit participants from targeted age groups for interviews and distribute questionnaires. Once the data is collected, I organize it according to different segments such as demographic and behavioral. I then create persona profiles, adding details and summarizing key insights from the data. Before utilizing the personas in my design, I validate and refine them by sharing with key stakeholders to ensure accuracy and relevance.

Name: Ram Kumarasubramanian

Title: Senior UX Researcher

Answer: It is essential to know why personas are needed, the context behind creating one, and how the team plans to use them. It is also helpful to align with the key partners and requestors to flesh out any existing assumptions and curate available resources to build a baseline understanding of the organizational needs before creating the plan for building a persona.

Personas are ideally created by conducting research with the target segments and analyzing the patterns and trends that emerge from the insights. The team working on building personas can leverage analytics and support data, such as call and chat transcripts, to identify the target segments and recruit appropriately for conducting persona research.

Name: Sheyla Amaral

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: To create user personas, I start by identifying and segmenting our in-house customer data. Once that’s done, I conduct a quantitative survey to gather additional information and confirm the in-house data. Depending on the project, interviews and focus groups are essential for obtaining more detailed analysis of behaviors, goals, and pain points. One particularly interesting project I worked on involved conducting a diary study with kids aged 8 to 12. It’s crucial to choose the method that aligns with your target audience so they can actively participate.

Question 3

Have you encountered any challenges in using user personas? If so, how have you addressed them?

Name: Ram Kumarasubramanian

Title: Senior UX Researcher

Answer: One of the challenges I have encountered in using personas is that there is great enthusiasm for building one or more personas at the start of the exercise, but the energy and commitment dwindle once these personas are created. The personas also tend to become stale over time, and often, there is a lack of real application in day-to-day work. An alternative might be maintaining a list of Jobs-to-be-done by each persona that gets refreshed periodically in the context of the problems being solved.

Name: Sheyla Amaral

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: One of the challenges I faced before was regarding the huge number of personas. Sometimes, businesses want products to range from 18 to 99 years old, and it makes it hard to prioritize design decisions when we have so many different user needs. While having a clear problem statement helps, it’s still too broad.

Another major challenge is keeping the personas updated. As user goals change over time, so do their needs. Continuously validating and analyzing data is costly and time-consuming, so often we end up not doing it.

Name: Irum Tariq

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: Creating and using user personas can present several challenges. One of the biggest challenges I face is the lack of accurate data. Personas are only as reliable as the data they’re based on, and inaccurate or insufficient data can result in personas that do not accurately represent the target audience. To address this, I validate my data by conducting follow-up interviews and surveys. Additionally, working closely with the analytics team and gathering as much information as possible helps me validate my research and ensure the personas are accurate.

Question 4

Are there specific scenarios where user personas prove more valuable than segmentation models, and vice versa?

Name: Irum Tariq

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: There are specific scenarios where user personas and segmentation models can each be more valuable. Understanding the contexts in which each tool is most effective can help make informed decisions about when to use them.

For example, when designing a new product interface or improving an existing one, user personas provide a detailed, narrative-driven understanding of users’ goals, behaviors, and pain points, helping designers create more intuitive and user-friendly interfaces.

On the other hand, when conducting market analysis and defining market entry strategies, segmentation models offer a broad overview of different market segments based on demographics, behaviors, and other quantifiable criteria, enabling businesses to identify and target high-potential market segments.

By recognizing the specific contexts and scenarios where each tool excels, you can effectively combine user personas and segmentation models to enhance decision-making and user-centered design processes.

Name: Ram Kumarasubramanian

Title: Senior UX Researcher

Answer: Personas often provide the most value when kickstarting product development from scratch. During this time, the team needs clarity to identify where to invest its time and resources to maximize value creation and minimize the risk of failure.

Personas can also be an excellent tool for onboarding new team members and orienting them to the nuances of the problem space.

Segments are more pertinent to targeting users for large-scale quantitative exercises such as surveys and growth-oriented activities such as ad-targeting.

Name: Sheyla Amaral

Title: Lead Product Designer

Answer: When building a product from scratch, starting with personas can help the team visualize the target users. It also assists in defining the tone and language for marketing efforts to reach those users. Product iterations and features are typically based on user needs, which can be validated using personas.

However, before using personas, it’s important to develop segmentation models. These models can help us understand promising markets and trends.

Takeaway

The insights provided by our design team members underscore the significance of empathy in design, particularly through the utilization of user personas.

User personas offer a means to humanize the design process, facilitating a deeper understanding of the target audience’s motivations and preferences. However, the frequency of creating user personas varies, often occurring at the onset of new projects due to constraints like time and resources.

Ensuring the relevance of user personas involves a meticulous process of research and validation, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods. Challenges such as maintaining updated personas and managing a large number of personas are acknowledged, requiring continuous validation and collaboration to address effectively.

In discerning between user personas and segmentation models, both serve distinct but complementary purposes. User personas guide product development and interface design by providing a narrative-driven understanding of user behaviors, while segmentation models offer broader market insights for strategic decision-making.

By integrating user personas and segmentation models effectively, designers can foster user-centered design approaches that resonate with their target audience, ultimately driving meaningful engagement and lasting connections.

Liked the insights shared in this article?

Catch our previous Ask A Designer articles here:

Ask A Designer: An Open Conversation with Product & UX Designers
Ask A Designer Round 2: Questions For Designers, From Developers
Ask A Designer Round 3: Staying Curious
Ask A Designer Round 4: Considering Accessibility and Designing Inclusively
Ask A Designer Round 5: The Dos and Don’ts of Design Thinking