What’s My Persona? Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character

Empathy Comes from Experiencing: Putting Yourself in Their Shoes

If we want to get in touch with the empathy we need to design for personas, the best place to begin is with the idea of transformation that provides a foundation for character development—and, therefore, also lays the groundwork for scenario construction. Actors go through a process of transformation in which they begin to truthfully take on a character. Stanislavski, in talking about his process of Method Acting, refers to this moment when actors realize emotional memory—when they have truly become the character—by stating:

“Only by a strongly developed sense of truth may he achieve a single inward beauty in which, unlike conventional theatrical gestures and poses, the true condition of the character is expressed on every one of his attitudes and outward gestures.”—Constantin Stanislavski

From there, the next natural progression is the idea of a sequence of events and the resulting cause-and-effect rhythm of scenario building. As an actor works on an improvisation, he builds scenes around actions—the cause and effect from which a natural dialogue arises. Through role-playing—or what we might call a dramaturgical reading—UX designers can work from the same foundation of truth, building a dialogue through which we can understand a potential computer-human interaction that will become a scenario of use.

The Believable Character Is Flexible and Dynamic

If we engage in this kind of role-playing and improvisation, amazing things will begin to happen. Your persona will become embodied. It will have life, connection, and be grounded in a reality that lets you—the designer—know what would work for this particular character and design the best solution. It’s easy to recognize this embodied, believable character.

An embodied dramatic persona will be

• dynamic
• more life-like than those that exist just on paper
• transferable to other concrete situations and contexts
• linked to other characters
• linked to time

Such a persona will also have

• multiple traits
• psychology, physiology, and sociology
• inner needs and goals
• interpersonal desires
• professional ambitions

The role-playing that lets us create embodied characters also leads to the natural development of realistic scenarios—sequences of actions—and authentic stories that provide believability through a truthful interaction, or improvisation, with a software product.

An authentic story encompasses

• a user’s surroundings—physical space and the available tools
• the character traits that characterize a user
• the goals, tasks, and accomplishments that characterize a user

Through these embodied personas and authentic stories, we can better understand the idiosyncrasies of real people—who work in a real, not an idealized world. We can begin to capture the details that let us tell a great story for users and create a design solution. Typically, current methods result in textual or visual outcomes for scenarios, but role-playing in an improvisational manner can enhance the level of detail you can capture for an experience—through

• trying out, or testing, your ideas
• discerning important contextual information in the moment
• gathering and exploring the creative contributions of participants
• collecting authentic and realistic scenarios that you can rapidly iterate

These are the kinds of personas and scenarios that can meet the tough challenges I outlined earlier—making them valuable in the development of user-centered designs.

How Do You Role-Play?

At this point, you may be wondering how you actually go about doing this role-playing and improvisation to achieve these embodied characters and authentic stories. It’s really not that hard and doesn’t have to be time consuming. It can be as simple as just reading the personas or scenarios out loud and imagining you are really doing what you are saying. You’d be amazed how much insight you can get from even that small endeavor. Check your insights against what you know from your data. Does it feel right? Is it lacking something? Does it spark anything else?

If you want to get a little more involved, there are other easy exercises you can engage in—like using your body to express the emotions or traits of the personas, through more than just facial expressions. This helps you really get an empathetic feel for the persona and may give you some insights into his emotional and psychological states—even responses that have their root in the persona’s value systems. Or you could find an object that is associated with a persona—like an element of a costume or a gadget—and use it to see what that tells you about how the persona uses physical objects. Doing his can help you find the sociological dimension and understand a persona’s character traits. You might even try expressing age—without verbal cues—if that is important to your personas. One easy exercise that seems to work well for a visual group is to build a collage of things—words, pictures, colors, and so on—that you feel represent the persona and keep them around in our work area for inspiration.

If you want to work on building scenarios, or stories, try starting by simply having members of your team tell a story about a persona’s accomplishing a task one word at a time—progressing through the story as you move from person to person. Or you can come up with some isolated sentences about a task your personas are trying to accomplish or a tool they might use, then take 10 minutes to brainstorm a story that incorporates all of the sentences. If you keep yourself grounded in the data you have collected about your users, your stories will reflect reality.

In that recasting of a Shakespeare play I told you about earlier, my character finally clicked for me when I figured out my most difficult relationship among the main characters. When I realized it was much like a relationship I had with one of my male friends in college, I got the role, had clear motivations and objectives, and was able to build a background and dimensions for the character that made it live. Finding one little piece can unlock a wealth of knowledge about a character, or persona. But you won’t find it unless you explore the options and find the storyline that truly works. I most certainly never would have understood my role without doing that. So, take your personas off their pages and embody them. They will live with you and, no doubt, influence your designs in a way that ensures their success with the users your characters, or personas, represent. 

References

Cooper, Alan. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams Publishing, 1999.

Interaction-Design.org. “Personas.” Interaction-Design.org. Retrieved August 26, 2009.

Koppett, Kat. Training to Imagine: Practical Improvisational Theatre Techniques to Enhance Creativity, Teamwork, Leadership, and Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2001.

Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. 3rd Edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999.