Author
I said in my previous personas-related post that just being able to see the face associated with a persona should be enough to act as a prompt; a reminder that they exist and they have certain characteristics.
But what if your persona isn’t represented by a person?
The problem with faces
We have recently been working with a client who wanted us to help them develop a set of representative personas that will be shared across many people within the organisation and potentially outside the organisation too.
This broad audience got the client thinking that they/we needed to be careful about the use of faces and names so as not to stereotype.
Faces can suggest gender, ethnicity, age, and even financial standing based on clothes, make-up, or hair for example.
Making a persona a particular gender or ethnicity, or from a particular background, is potentially problematic and could lead to the group developing and sharing the personas being seen in a bad light.
Can you ever truly represent a group?
There is definitely a chance of reinforcing stereotypes in choosing a person to represent a group. But isn’t that inevitable in an exercise like this? Personas are meant to be representative. That’s the point of them. But there’s no way you can pick a single person to completely represent a group so you are inevitably going to get it wrong in some people’s eyes.
Possible solutions
So what can we do? We could make a set of personas the same gender and from the same ethnic background. That could work but you risk making your personas rather forgettable. If we make them similar or very generic so there is little difference between them, then we’re probably wasting our time.
I’m not suggesting, in this scenario, there’s no point doing the work to develop personas and understand their characteristics, but trying to create memorable versions of these personas may be a pointless exercise.
But maybe there are some options that we could take. We could use illustrations where gender and ethnicity are essentially removed, or even something non-human like animals or the Monopoly pieces, but even with those choices (animals/Monopoly) you could still be making choices about a group that might be perceived badly.
My problem with this kind of approach – the animals in particular – is they’re not representative, they’re misleading or distracting.
There may be a way that we can use colour and/shapes to differentiate the personas. ‘This is the red triangle persona’, for example. But I think there would need to be something relating to the persona that is memorable too.
Could a name be enough?
We could get creative (and therefore memorable) with quirky, maybe rhyming or alliterative persona descriptions such as ‘Leona the Donor’ or ‘Tech-challenged Terry’!
So maybe Tech-challenged Terry on a yellow background, alongside Loyal Linda on blue, and Mobile Marcus (!) on red could be memorable enough to work without an associated picture.
Conclusion
I’m left in two minds. I think having a picture really helps the adoption of personas into working processes, but I also think making choices about those images is potentially problematic.
I think for a small internal group, done with care, it’s ok to use pictures of people in your personas. But, for anything with a larger audience, text-only personas – using other means to make them memorable – is the way to go.