 They go by the name of user profiles, behavioral archetypes, customer avatars, but will use the term personas and in this video you'll learn how useful they are and if you should be spending your time creating one. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Serbs Design Show. This show is all about helping you do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that are good for people and business. One of the things you see Serbs designers using a lot are personas. If you've never heard of personas, this video isn't a full explanation about what they are, but in short there are a way to segment a group of people, not by their demographics, but much rather by their behaviors, by their desires, by their needs. Now why would you want to do that? One of the most important reasons is you can't create a solution for every individual person. You can't make a tailored service for every single person. So you need to make choices and you need to base your design decisions on larger groups. Personas help you to focus on those groups and basically help you to allocate the limited resources and time and money that you have in designing solutions that fit your most interesting customers, whether they are patients, students, train travelers. Personas help you to focus your time and energy and resources on the right people and doing the right things. So first let's look at a few reasons why personas have gotten a bad reputation recently. And this is not the way you should be creating personas, by the way. What you see with personas is that they tend to be pretty superficial. They don't uncover the true needs and desires of people and they are based a lot on opinions and assumptions rather than actual evidence. Another thing is that a lot of personas end up as quite static documents, like almost an art piece, good looking poster, rather than something that is more of a practical tool and useful in a day-to-day design process. That's not a mistake people make. And the final one is, and maybe that's the most important one, a lot of personas sort of feel disconnected with reality. Persona, the described persona, almost becomes or a caricature, sort of a comic figure, which is not relatable to actual people. Or it becomes so generic that you can't actually base your design decisions upon it. So these are not the things you should avoid these things when you're making a persona, but these are some of the reasons why they've been getting a bad reputation lately. And we shouldn't take this lightly because these types of personas could set you off in completely the wrong direction. They could give you the false sense that you're doing the right things while you're not, so basically wasting your time. And it could also be an excuse for actually not interacting with real people, which you should, of course, always do. So, yeah, personas can end up doing more harm than good. So it's fair to pose the question, how useful are personas actually? Should you spend your time creating them? Well, there are two reasons why personas are useful. One is that they help you to make design decisions. They can save you a lot of time in the design process. So decisions that feel complex can become really trivial when you're using personas. Like, I'm going to use a really oversimplified example just as an example, but if you're designing a screen and you're debating with your design team if it should contain a photo of a person, a profile photo, because that adds credibility to the app, to the field, to the screen. I don't know. You might be debating this with your team. Do we feel that we need to add more credibility or not? And it becomes a game of opinions and discussions. Well, if you look at a persona and you say, OK, the need of this persona is trust, he really desires, she really desires trust, then you sort of derive your decisions based on that and you stay away from personal opinions and judgments. And that can save you so much time. And like I said, some design decisions become really trivial. Personas can really act like a compass to do the right thing. And the second reason why personas can be useful is that they help you to validate your design decision. So that's on the other side of the spectrum. Now, imagine that you don't always have the opportunity to have a real customer sitting next to you in the design process. That might be ideal, but that's usually not the case. And a persona sort of helps you to always check and to always empathize with the people you're designing for. And if you don't have that, it's really easy to stray away from the needs and desires of your end users and start to think from your own perspective. And the role of personas is always to have like a sort of a mirror to always mirror and to always empathize with the people you're designing for. So that's really, really powerful and useful use of personas to use it as a mirror and to empathize with your customers even when they're not sitting next to you. So this sounds great, right? Who doesn't want this? So what's the problem? Well, the term personas has been diluted over the past years. And the problem is that the most personas that I've seen are really shallow and lack evidence, lack depth. So they basically end up being opinions shaped and visualized like a persona to make it look credible. But in the end, they don't really help to guard your design process and even to damage in the guiding your design process because they are just opinions. And that is a really bad thing. But maybe my biggest problem with personas is the fact that they are presented as facts. They are often presented as sort of a scientific document and they tend to appeal more to the left brain rather than the right side of our brain. So for me, personas are all about empathizing, not showing truth, but all about feeling and thinking from your customer's perspective about what you need to do. And most personas I've seen over the last years don't do that. They don't generate empathy. I don't know if that's the right word, but they don't let you feel the person you're designing for. They help you to understand them, but that's not the same. A persona should really be about empathy. So am I saying that personas are evil? Might sound that way, right? But I think if you think about it as a service designer, you need to know who you are designing for. You need to know the needs and desires. You need to understand the context. So you need to do that anyway. And if you turn that into, turn those insights into a tangible document that you can share, that you can refer to, I think that's super useful. I think that's actually a must. Now, if you should call that document a persona, I think that's open for debate. I've seen that from my experience, I've been using different terms. I've been using tools and terms like the empathy map that I'll link down in the show notes or customer avatars, user profiles. I've been using those terms more lately, primarily because they give, I feel that they give me more room to present them as a sketch, as a work in progress document, rather than something that is scientifically proven and is the truth and is done. A persona isn't done. It's a document that is alive. And that's the really important part. So when I'm using things like empathy maps or user profiles or customer avatars that basically contain the same information as a persona but are presented in a different way and are perceived in a different way, I feel that that's far more useful in our design process. I will be digging into the topic of personas much further. So if you have a question, just leave it down below. And I'd love to know, are you using personas? Why? And why not? And if not, are you using something else? Let me know. If you want to know how to create actually useful personas, check out the video over here. So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.