Empathising with users, not personas
Personas — the symbol of user experience design. A widely misunderstood one. While they help in ensuring that your users are thought about, it’s simply not possible to develop empathy for the end user by just looking at persona profiles.
When I was starting out in UX, some clients required personas as a part of the deliverables in a project. And I complied with that, it made sense to me at the time.
At some point I noticed that I almost never even look at them during the design process. I also discovered that many clients never took a look at them or confused them with marketing segments (which is a common mistake). Sometimes they even requested to make changes to persona profiles… It was a waste of time, and I hate wasting resources. Commoditising personas will eventually make them extinct in the industry, and many companies are already escaping this burden.
I used to stick persona posters on a wall, directly above my screen — to sort of keep in touch with them and it helped me a lot. But I had been ready to design so much earlier than we created the personas. Talking to real people, hearing their stories, reading their discussions on certain parts of their lives — that’s when empathy is being developed.
During user research I get this feeling of saturation after a number of interviews or other research activities. That feeling that tells me “You got it, Michal. You’re ready to distill what you have and design”. And that’s what I do, because going past that point will get me going in circles, because I’ve already found all the relevant behavioural or emotional patterns. It might be similar to a feeling that a detective gets when solving a case. Suddenly it all makes sense.
This stage is quite tricky for a researcher, because empathy is not transferrable. What you can do is involve the whole team in research or share rich data (audio, video) you collected. Or eventually create persona profiles. But it’s the research process that helps you diffuse the findings in your team, not the superficial deliverables. So involve everybody in research, as much as it is viable for your project.
You don’t develop empathy from personas. Just like you don’t taste a lollipop through a shop window.
