Supercharging personas to elevate experience design
When personas come to life, so does the experience
As experience designers, we regularly see the huge value that comes from not just building personas to represent an audience, but lifting these personas off the page to become 3D, living, breathing representations of a group of people. Bringing personas to life helps us design and build effective and meaningful experiences for any audience. And well-informed experience design can positively affect every interaction our audience has – whether that audience is employees, partners, consumers or any other group.
In this post I share some of FathomXP’s experiences of bringing personas to life to enhance experience design. I’ve also spoken to a number of other experience designers to highlight some of the creative ways they are using and elevating personas.
“Design solves problems. No matter how generic that problem is, the audience is the context for every challenge.”
At FathomXP, we not only build customer and employee personas, we also bring them to life to create deeper empathy and engagement between organisations and their employees and customers.
Examples of experiences we’ve designed using personas:
Leadership development and high potential development programmes
Customer closeness programmes with a demonstrable impact on employees’ understanding of and connection to customers
Product innovation and design
Employer brand and recruitment campaigns
Employee onboarding
Please note, in this post, I’m using the term persona in its generic sense. This includes pen portraits, archetypes and personas. See an explanation of the differences in content, form and utility between employee personas here.
The essence of personas
Personas are more than mere profiles; they are vivid, detailed representations of your audience, crafted from a blend of demographic, psychographic and behavioural data. They encapsulate the desires, frustrations, and behaviours of defined user groups, enabling designers to foresee how these users might interact with your offer under various conditions.
“The hardest thing as designers is to set aside our assumptions and ego. We need to be there as a curious observer to deeply understand the audience. A lot of clients think that they know who their audience is – but it’s often who they want them to be rather than who they actually are.”
Once we set aside our ego, we can set aside our assumptions and glean the true insights we need to design great experiences for our audience.
“Conducting personas research for a wedding business client of ours, we found that a significant number of their clients were Hindu, which they hadn’t realised. Before, we just looked through ‘wedding goggles’ and used golds and whites. We realised we needed a lot more colour. In Latin, persona means ‘mask’. The tool allows us to put on that mask and embody the character, becoming possessed by them. If we embody the persona, we can solve problems as that persona.”
Creating personas
1. Research the audience
The first step is to create a user research strategy based on a clear articulation of what it is you are seeking to understand about the audience. Researchers then gather data through multiple channels, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups and direct observation. This phase is crucial for understanding the nuanced realities of the target audience, often revealing unexpected insights.
For example, Mark McCulloch led the marketing campaign ‘Rise Fast, Work Young’ to change perceptions of hospitality industry careers. The aim was to grab the attention of under 30s, particularly those in entry-level jobs. He explained:
“We identified that Gen Z was the largest flippable population from other entry-level jobs and similar manual industries. We then interviewed Gen Zs in all kinds of positions in hospitality, all over the UK – everyone from a 23-year-old who ran a £2m business, to on-the-floor teams. This gave us real nuggets like: ‘You cannot go further, faster than in hospitality’; ‘I’d rather work nine hours in hospitality than two hours in a call centre’; and ‘I would go in on my days off as these people are my family.’ The take-out was that hospitality is for extroverts in the main, neurodivergent people and those who baulk at the idea of working in a mundane job that is the same nine to five every day. ”
Source: Hospitality Rising campaign
Another example of how to research the audience from real life data comes from Natalie Burns from UnitedUs agency:
“Many designers are bored of personas. They are a trope in our industry, a templatised checklist item. To combat this, our strategy and planning team builds rich personas from many data sources, ideally co-creating them with the client, bringing in real-life stories of people who represent the personas. It’s those stories and a sense of character that lift personas off the page and render them valuable, believable and knowable.”
2. Create personas
Once the data is collected, the next challenge is synthesis. This means distilling data to uncover patterns and commonalities that define distinct user groups. This process often involves sorting an audience based on their needs, behaviours and motivations. These characteristics might include the persona’s goals, challenges, skills, and preferences toward certain technologies, products, or services. This gives us a shared language to talk about our audience. After rounds of testing, validation and refinement, these groups evolve into personas. For experience design, each persona typically includes a name, a fictional yet plausible background, and specific characteristics that reflect the collected data.
Depending on the type of persona and the intended use, design teams will typically have an (ideally) small number of personas (five to seven) so they are manageable and knowable. Sometimes there may be a case for a larger group. Running an industry-funded campaign gave Mark McCulloch of Hospitality Rising specific considerations:
“Hospitality is a broad church. We had to represent every major role from hotel cleaning teams, to baristas, and chefs to bar staff, and general managers to fast food and more. Only by representing every role, would we get the buy-in from the hospitality industry to fund the campaign. However, as well as roles, there was an equally important piece to consider – inclusivity. The hospitality industry is more diverse and inclusive than any I have encountered. We wanted to celebrate that in all its dimensions to ensure we made everyone feel welcome.”
Source: Hospitality Rising campaign
“Our clients are often trying to reach new audiences, so our strategy team uses various techniques to create personas – from benchmarking, to primary interviews and surveys. Then, our creative team visualise the personas as characters to help fix them in people’s minds. This allows our team to explore and have conversations about them and to design focused branding which connects on an emotional level.”
3. Empathise with the personas
In experience design, the next stage in developing and applying personas to a design challenge is building empathy maps. An empathy map typically explores personas in six categories: what that persona says, thinks, does, and feels, as well as their pains and gains. Each category of the empathy map represents a snapshot of the user's thoughts and feelings. This tool helps teams develop deep, shared understanding and empathy for the personas.
“A key advancement from reptile to mammal is empathy. This comes from basic human needs. If I’m nursing my young, I must empathise with them. Our entire operating system is built around interacting with other humans. So we need to humanise the data set to understand it.”
Source: Pigalle Tavakkoli, experience design educator & trainer
“When people create personas, the data is often focused on how the audience interacts with your event/service/product. But the majority of valuable information you need to find out about is what they are doing in their day-to-day life. What do they care about – what’s preoccupying their thoughts, what drives their decisions, what are their values? Their inner motivations and aspirations will lead the design direction and form meaningful connections.”
Bringing personas to life
To make personas actionable, we create scenarios in which the personas operate. These scenarios help predict how personas might interact with a product or service, guiding and provoking the design process by simulating real-world usage.
Personas are brought to life at various stages of the experience design process:
Ideation
Personas help democratise the design process. In ideation sessions, they shift the focus from subjective opinions, to what best serves the persona. This empowers teams to make decisions based on user-centric data rather than hierarchy or conjecture.
“For one project, I brought in volunteer target consumers to be interviewed by the creative team. The creative team’s biggest insight was that they were shocked by how little their consumers thought about their brand or the product. In reality, the consumer is busy thinking about their own life. I also bring ethnographic research into workshops to breathe life into the persona, creating artefact boxes with photos, objects and other elements of their life, so teams develop empathy and deeper understanding about them.”
Image source: Pigalle Tavakkoli
“You need to maximise the potential for collaboration. Decision-making is so painful for teams – it’s often those who have the loudest voice or the highest rank whom we listen to, but personas cut through and empower the whole team to have their say as everyone has a shared understanding of the audience.”
Prototyping
As prototypes of products or services are developed, personas are used to test usability and effectiveness. Designers ask questions like "How would Persona X interact with this feature?" or "What would frustrate Persona Y in this scenario?"
“Every decision should be taken based on the audience’s needs, rather than ‘I think they would like this.”
Source: Jerry Lee, SEEQ spaceship at Electric Daisy Carnival
“With my large-scale festival art installations, I play-test live on-site with thousands of people daily, as it’s impossible to simulate the environment. I watch people and create personas around what I see: demographics, personalities, etc. I then design around this real audience. It’s an ongoing process of iteration – it’s not linear.”
Audience engagement
In leadership programmes and employee activation programmes, we have the opportunity to bring the audience to life in a visceral way and to disrupt assumptions about them.
For example, a banking client of FathomXPs was running a leadership conference. We halted proceedings and simulated a live tech crisis, having customers dial in to express their real-life concerns, which leaders had to resolve there and then. The customers were actors, well briefed, but it felt real to the leaders. This creative simulation interrupted the usual leadership flow and swung the pendulum within the event, created more empathy with customers, and saw high levels of engagement within the leadership community.
With a customer closeness programme for Nectar we did a range of exciting initiatives to bring the personas to life, from interviewing customers in the street and writing up our findings on giant persona cut-outs back in the office, to role-playing personas’ experience of Nectar in the middle of Hoxton Square in London. As a result of this program Nectar employees could really understand the customers behind the data.
“The company feels like it’s back in pioneering start-up mode again; everyone here is highly engaged now and even more dedicated to the customer.”
Source: FathomXP
Back to Hospitality Rising, I asked Mark McCulloch how they created the campaign experience:
“We had to make sure the Hospitality Rising campaign experience was more like a Fortnite / Tik Tok / Fashion brand. We found an incredible Vietnamese award-winning model maker who created these confident, bold and dynamic characters who you want to be and faceless so you can see yourself being them. The clothing was as vital as the pose and the person. We worked hard to make something for for Gen Z and not ‘dad at the disco’ as so many recruitment ads look today. We bucked the trend and reaped the rewards.”
Conclusion
Incorporating personas into the design process transforms abstract audience data into relatable, humanised characters that teams can empathise with and design for. By understanding and embodying these personas, we can create more impactful, user-centric experiences that resonate deeply with our audience. As technology advances, the tools and methods for developing and utilising personas will continue to evolve, offering even more sophisticated ways to understand and engage with users. Ultimately, the key to successful experience design lies in the ability to see through the eyes of the audience, fostering empathy and insight that drive meaningful and effective solutions. By embracing this approach, we can ensure our designs meet real needs and create lasting, positive interactions.
