Is there a better way to build personas?
As someone working with behavior, I am always looking at ways in which we can bring theories, models and frameworks to help us get better and more precise insights to help us design better experiences.
Of course, when it comes to personas or archetypes - the way we create them will really depend on what we working on - meaning it will be driven by the context.
When it comes to enriching these archetypes - we usually combine several approaches - for example we may include the Big 5, drivers from COM-B, motivation from Prime, etc... and as this paper talks about psychological needs.
The most important thing is to look for patterns and see how those patterns can fit to build your archetypes or personas.
What would this look like in practice (as per the paper)
Well, the researcher built a few personas - one of them is William: (would I add a name to a persona - maybe yes as it is more of a character - but to an archetype - no)
“In terms of motivation, 53-year-old single William ( again they used demographics - I would probably not add this in an archetype, unless it would be something needed that would need to be accounted for in the design)
William is intrinsically motivated to go for a walk on a regular basis because he really enjoys it. - however, he drinks a lot and does not eat very healthy.
Since he is single, there is nobody to stop him or encourage him.
William experiences a need for relatedness that is not fulfilled.
He really craves endorsement from his friends but they drink even more and do not care about living a healthy lifestyle.
William’s competence is low. He lacks knowledge about healthy eating behavior and, on top of that, he is not really motivated to change his eating habits.
Moreover, he perceives his autonomy to be quite low.
He is convinced that his personality is holding him back and that it is impossible for him to sustainably change his weight.
For this reason, William is very unlikely to seek professional help.”
Aside from psychological needs, there is so much to unpack in that short statement that would help drive the design.
William was created in a paper by Jansen and colleagues (2017) that looked at the use of established theories on human behavior for the construction of personas.
As I mentioned earlier, they used Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as a framework for constructing personas of overweight adults.
These personas were used to design a coaching app to support sustainable weight loss and promote a healthy lifestyle.
The authors found that SDT was useful in various stages of persona creation, such as gathering and analyzing data, identifying behavioral variables, mapping interview subjects to variables, and writing persona descriptions.
I for sure welcome more of this kind of combination of theory into practice and it is something we definitely do in our consulting work.
What do you think about approaches like these?