Describing Personas: problems with bias and how Thinking Style archetypes can help | Inclusive Software
Demographics can cause assumptions, shortcuts in thinking, and subconscious stereotypes by team members.
Keep the well-researched persona and replace those demographic descriptions with descriptions of the underlying reasoning. Reasoning rarely conforms to demographic lines. (I’ll show some exceptions below.)
Statements-of-fact, preferences, and demographics frequently serve as distracting barriers. They kick off all kinds of subconscious reactions in team members minds. For instance, phrases such as “low-income,” “single mother,” and “good at math” mean something to you because of your own life experience, people you know, and things you’ve read. It takes extra mental effort to get out from under what you already think in response to these phrases. Additionally, the phrases represent what is important to your organization in terms of its direction. “How can we attract more low-income students? Or single mothers?” Your ideas will derive from the existing frame of thinking. It will limit your creativity.
If you know what’s important to the people, instead of what’s important to you and your organization, then you can dream up much more powerful support for them.
This.
It has to be a description the people who are represented would embrace.
Re: naming your archetype or TS
Think Carefully About Exceptions
There are some instances where using a demographic is appropriate. These instances have to do with how people react or reason based on what they are seeing about a person — usually fraught with assumptions.
So often, age is stated numerically. I hope teams will change this to a description. Indeed, a “phase of life” might work, or a physiological or health description, or a life event. I like to work in the underlying reasoning wherever possible. Don’t ignore age, but don’t describe it using numbers.
If you infer from my tweet that demographics would be replaced by lists of data, these concerns would indeed be valid. But the examples in this essay demonstrate that I am replacing demographics with the inner thinking which enables stronger development of empathy.
Cognitive empathy requires not a face, not preferences and demographics, but the underlying reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles. Without these you cannot develop empathy. And if you cannot develop empathy, you cannot wield it — you cannot walk in someone’s shoes. (I speak about the differences between and uses of emotional empathy and cognitive empathy in this Creative Mornings talk on Empathy.)
Scope and context are paramount to your personas. A persona that attempts to represent every aspect of a person overall is pretty much useless.
Personas don’t work as generalizations; they need specific context. This is because personas aren’t meant for overall uses — they’re meant for ideation and designing solutions within a specific scope that your organization is concerned with this month or quarter.
A person is human, and humans don’t remain exactly the same all the time, unswayed by mood or circumstances. Which might seem frustrating when you’re trying to capture the idea of someone in a persona … so that’s why you narrow down the context to a certain situation and focus the scope on what goes through peoples minds as they move toward a particular intent or purpose.
It does require a different mindset. You need to slow down and try to understand what’s beneath what someone says by asking them. You can only get deeper by establishing trust and rapport. You also have to turn off the impulse to solve problems in your head as you hear about them. You have to let go of your product and your organization entirely because this isn’t about them, it’s about the person and what the person is aiming for in the greater scheme of things. And, all this is better to do by phone than in person. (In most cases.) You don’t need to see their artifacts or observe their behavior, because the knowledge you are after only exists in their minds.
This kind of information is collected in small studies, maybe 10–18 participants each. You don’t need to do it all the time — it is completely separate from your development cycle. You will never know everything about people, so you approach it like natural science and explore one little aspect at a time.
No, you cannot collect this kind of information via survey. There’s no way you could think up in advance all the possible ways people reason, react, and guide their decisions, in order to put them in checkbox format on a survey.
Posted on July 4, 2021