Are there better ways to build your personas?
Recently we have been improving the way we create behavioral archetypes for some of our projects - for the sake of clarity - there is not one way to build that beats them all.
(I know personas and archetypes are not the same thing and it has been written many times over by other people before)
For us archetypes are the place where we are able to bring together our insights, patterns, models and theories. Of course you can then create "characters" or "personas" if you want to bring those alive and if they serve your context a purpose.
In any project research is going to be key - sometimes time and budget may hinder you, so you need to have a way of still bringing it in research when time and resources are constrained - this takes critical thinking to know how much and where to look.
There are many places where you can look for inspiration aside from your internal data - think about things like literature or theories like Self Determination or the Big 5 personality traits.
You can also find inspiration in the work of practitioners like Indi Young or Amber Westerholm- Smyth and countless other fantastic people.
Amber wrote a quite popular piece on a while ago and said of building personas that you should have:
-No ages -No photographs -No salaries -No names -No genders
You should instead be thinking about patterns that they share in getting their job done/needs met or in getting to their intended outcome or purpose.
I like to think about those from a behavioral perspective and look at things like beliefs, norms, decision-making, memory, motivation quality, attention, fears, anxieties, as well as other attributes... (cognition, capability, environment). These can serve as a foundation and from there you can add anything else that will add context.
Amber also described the process she and her team took to build her personas: (maybe you would call these archetypes)
A five-step framework
1. Ask rich questions, not dumb questions 2. Write a codebook 3.
Code your data 4. Map your data 5. Form your personas (or archetypes)
It's important to think critically about how we design experiences for our customers and employees - and to re-evaluate if we are doing so in the best way possible - and not to let them be static pages on a presentation.
How are you accounting for your customers and employees?