Over the weekend I was reading/rereading about personas and archetypes.
With personas being used and misused during product development, we just seemed to have put too many “how not to” and “how to” for personas. There is a detailed book as well. Somewhere along time, we seem to have lost the real motivation for making personas. Personas need to go back to it’s roots of simple, empathy to become a good decision making tool.
Most of you guys who live in the US know Trader Joe’s. For those who don’t it is a national chain of grocery stores that sell good quality food for a reasonable price. These stores are usually small and hence they carry a limited number of items in the store. They make a profit every year. How do they do it. They have a very simple way to empowering everybody in their organization to make the right decisions. It’s by asking a single question “Will an unemployed, college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo buy this?”. If the answer is yes, they stock it. This is from HBR Dec 2006
Amazing!
How can I apply something like this in other domains like technology. Let me try to analyze what is really good about the good old professor:
- It is emotional enough that everybody can feel empathy.
- It is simple enough that the information hidden in the one sentence does not get lost when you are under pressure to make a million decisions.
- Everybody in the chain from the purchaser to the exec uses and permeates this framework to make decisions
Empathy first:
Early on during the Product development I need to create empathy for my target user (who is very different from me). The only way I can do it is by making stories emotional. I need to feel like this is my aunt living in Boise.
Information next:
Simple, visual articulation, the data is pushed out into the appendix. Its for the people who will dig in, not for the people who have been forced to dig in. I know of a company that made persona posters that had spelling errors because even the researcher who made the personas did not read through all the detail 
. Best if I can make it tweetable.
Design for viral:
How can I make it permiate through the organization. Execs need a mantra to repeat at every all hands. Project managers need a quick yes or no answer and don’t have time to consult research.
Please feel free to comment or email…
photo credits: andybardill
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post, Pree! If you really do have an aunt that lives in Boise, that is the perfect persona for empathy.
I totally agree about information second. We all process information differently…have you seen the use of “decision styles”?
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&contentId=855125
I think it gives a great framework for prioritizing information needs.
Sam Ladner’s last blog post..#TOEthno: is Twitter a “place”?
Sam, thanks for the link about decision styles. Don’t have access to databases from home, so will check when I get in to work.
P.S: Don’t think I have an aunt in Boise…but I am (east) Indian, I have aunts and cousins everywhere
Thanks for the little linkage. I don’t know if the Trader Joe’s example is really empathy-inducing. It creates a heuristic for evaluating the decision space a Trader Joe staffer feels, but does it provide any facility for inducing an emotional response? I think that’s part of the big lie of personas; I think they are very cold and the more manufactured and unreal they are, the more cleaned up and prettified and removed from reality they are, the less they are really able to make someone FEEL something and thus operate from a state of empathy.
Steve Portigal’s last blog post..All This Machinery Marketing Modern Media
Thanks for the comment Steve. At the end of the day we both know its a tool/framework and it has it place in design research.
Regarding empathy, I go back to Scott Mccloud for inspiration.
http://www.scottmccloud.com/inventions/triangle/triangle.html
The simple statement from Trader Joe’s leaves a lot to be said. Hence allowing every person to create a story and put himself/herself into the professor’s shoes.