Personas: Competing or Complementary?

Summary: I wax philosophical about attributes of personas. These attributes can be competing or complementary and this tension (or harmony) yields different design challenges. I elaborate on this theory.

The other day, while working on the chapter for Personas, this thought popped into my head:

Personas’ motivations, needs, and goals can be competitive or complementary.

Here’s an attempt to explain this theory in more detail:

In a group of personas, each persona represents a collection of motivations, objectives, and behaviors. Let’s call these the attributes of the persona. Within a group, two personas may have attributes that are either competitive or complementary.

Competitive Persona Attributes

Competitive attributes yield different priorities in the design of a product. One persona needs one thing, and another persona needs an opposing thing, and the design must somehow accommodate both. One strategy is to prioritize one persona’s needs over another. Another strategy is to prioritize those attributes the personas have in common. Still another is to design separate products. Of course, the path of most resistance (though arguably the most successful) is to devise a product that somehow accommodates both needs without sacrificing another.

The litmus test for competitive attributes is pretty straightforward: take out one of the competing personas and you’d design a different site.

Imagine you’re designing a web site that matches dog-walkers with customers. The web site allows people to find a new dog walker, then handle the logistics of scheduling walks. It’s complicated: is this a regular once-a-day walk, or is it more frequent visits while you’re on vacation? Do you care which dog-walker comes, or can we send anyone? What kind of report do you want on your dog? Do we need to take care of other pets? So much to think about.

For this site, there might be two personas: regulars and vacationers. Regulars want to set up recurring visits and get quick reports on their dogs. Vacationers need infrequent visits and may want more detailed reports. The challenge is balancing the needs of these two customers in designing the service. How do you know that these personas have competing attributes? If you had to accommodate only one, you’d likely design a different site, right?

Complementary Persona Attributes

But there’s a third persona–the dog-walker herself. The attributes of this persona complement the other two. Her motivations and behaviors work in concert with the customer personas to achieve common objectives–a happy dog. Though she’d likely use a different interface altogether, you could imagine some cross-over screens that are used by both the customer and the dog-walker.

Conclusions about the Theory

Based on these assumptions, there are some conclusions that we can draw:

• Personas may have competitive or complementary attributes, but two personas don’t need to be 100% competitive or complementary.
• Any group of personas is going to composed of a mix of competitive and complementary.
• Competitive attributes are challenging because they introduce especially complex constraints.
• Complementary attributes are challenging because they can lead to scope creep.

Personas Relate to the Product, Not Each Other

The moment I had the thought, I posted this on Twitter:

A group of personas can have either competing or complementary objectives/motivations/behaviors. True or false? Does it matter?

Responses rolled in from @ebuie, @jmspool, @inkblurt, @katiewornson, @anaveca, @diesh, and EightShapes’ own @detzi. Jared’s response summed up all the feedback best:

It’s not about the relationships to each other. It’s the personas relationships to the design/experience.

Twitter is, of course, a lousy medium for engaging in theoretical discussion. Still, my interpretation of Jared’s 140-character thought is that personas are not meant to be compared.

Extending that idea, I see enormous merit in forcing designers to think about their audience as a contiguous whole with different attributes that pervade to varying degrees. Personas and other segmentation strategies raise artificial boundaries between users, corralling them into convenient buckets that allow us to summarize their needs. Further, such grouping encourages prioritization, allowing us to ask “Which set of user needs is most important?” Such comparisons paint a picture of our target audience as a quilt–big interlocking squares–and not as a heterogenous organism similarities and differences throughout. This conclusion raises a useful methodological question: Should project teams prioritize personas?

But…

But I’m not interested in addressing that big question here and now. I’m more interested in looking at the range of attributes of our target audience (whether we assign them to a particular group or not) and recognizing the inherent tension or harmony in them.

At a practical level, the theory gives designers another way to analyze personas and user requirements. It allows us to look at how much a product needs to balance competing needs or how much it needs to facilitate complementary behaviors.

Still, if we wanted to zoom out, the theory yields another interesting methodological question: Can we represent target audiences by collections of needs and behaviors without further segmentation? Can we create a picture that shows the range of attributes and the degree to which those attributes operate at odds or  in concert?

This probably won’t make it into the book (too new, controversial, and untested) but I may integrate it into our next user research project.