When I started my design career, my teacher always screens an advertisement for Dove beauty sketches and asks us what we understood from that video.
We were always told that (i) perspectives differ from one person to another, and (ii) we always think critically when it comes to ourselves. This exercise helped me understand how we think when we are alone. And we must not work as researchers alone because perspectives differ.
But when it comes to a real-life project in the UX design industry, many times we are asked to work on something like a “proto persona,” or what we can call a “provisional persona.” What are they, how can they help us in the design process, and is it a good practice to do one?
Proto-persona or provisional-persona
A proto-persona is a fully fictional persona that is created without research. It is to try and guess the users who are going to use the product and why. It is mostly done in a workshop with the stakeholders, clients, and designers. A persona is like the most important data, which helps us empathize with the user and get into their shoes. Typically, the proto personas later must be checked against actual data while doing the project, or else it still hangs as a hypothesis document.
If you see most companies that do proto personas, they do it when it is in a lean UX process, during an agile process where you don't have a shrinkage of data, or when the company feels research is more expensive and does proto personas instead.
The process of doing a proto-persona
Firstly, create a workshop plan for the proto-persona among your stakeholders, clients, and team. Why is it important to work it out as a team exercise? Because when one person works on it, you will get one perspective, which is prone to bias, but when you bring a team together, at least we will gain more assumptions from a diverse perspective.
Step 1: Brief your Stakeholders
"Proto personas are made-up personas that are created during workshops. They are based on the team’s theories about who the users might be and what they require. They can help team members who may not be familiar with real users to have a silhouette of users." — Bruce Tognazzini
The first step is informing the participants about the characteristics of a proto-persona, which are
NO RESEARCH
Quick
Light weight
Step 2: Brainstorm:
Once understanding how a proto persona works, now the objective for the activity is shared. Now the stakeholders cans start to cumulate ideas
1. Identification & Segmentation:
Who are the ones who are potentially going to use the product?
What is the nature of the user?
How can we segment them?
Here, the stakeholders will start to find all the people who may use a platform or a product. The client will also share about the experiences of users, which is a great insight into this exercise. Even the client will be able to understand their users. Once identified, these users are put into groups with respect to their nature, basically segmenting them into meaningful and manageable groups.
2. Attribute Profiling
Now finding the attributes of these groups, what are the characters of the people in these groups, what commonalities do they have, and how they would be different from each other. This we will do for:
Demographics: For each user group, demographic elements like gender, location, age, and profession can be defined.
Empathy map (needs, wants, goals, and pain points): Although we don't have user empathy here, we must try and define these user group's needs, pain points, etc. to get a clearer understanding.
Derive the essentials: What do they really need as a solution from the above chart? This must be defined here. Once we know these details about the different groups, we can come to a common conclusion through spectrum profiling.
3. Spectrum Profiling
Prepare a linear spectrum diagram with the different characteristics of the users.
For each group, start jotting down your dots on this spectrum as to where their attribute falls.
Understand the pattern and consolidate the attribute with the average in the spectrum profile. Make that your users attribute.
Step 3: Arrange
Now do the infallible. Use a persona template and arrange your proto persona with probably an archetype, a quote, and there you go. Your proto-persona is ready.
Tidbit: The word persona is derived from the Latin word for mask.
Common mistakes
The most common mistake while doing a proto-persona is when the client comes and gives us a persona worked out by himself. When the project brief is given, the client jots out a persona that he thinks is there. But most of the time, it is very unilateral in the thinking process. That is why we can also involve the client in the workshop and add his insights to the proto-persona.
This proto-persona must not be the only persona made for a study. Which may lead to design blunders. This proto-persona can be a hypothesis, but it is not a replacement for the original research process.
Conclusion
Although design processes are data-driven, sometimes making a proto-persona fully with assumptions will probably move forward in the design project. But it could also have adverse effects.
The purpose of a proto-persona is to provide a quick and lightweight understanding of potential users and their needs. While it can be a valuable starting point in projects following lean UX or agile methodologies, it is crucial to recognize that proto-personas are based on assumptions and must be validated against real user data during the project’s progression. In conclusion, while proto-personas can offer a preliminary direction in a design project, they should be used cautiously and complemented by robust user research to ensure accurate and effective design decisions.
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