A while back I listened to an old episode of “Revisionist History”, a brilliant podcast by renowned author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell. In this particular episode, Gladwell speaks with personalities from the world of country music to delve into why country music can make you cry, and rock can’t.
Now, Nashville is not my preferred musical universe, and it may not be yours either, but stay with me here.
After a series of fascinating insider tales, Gladwell suggests that
- Country music, similar to rap music, is targeted to represent a narrow, defined group. Rock music, on the other hand, is made by a much more diverse group for a very diffuse audience.
- Because of this, country and rap artists can be very specific about the situations, experiences and emotions they describe. Rock music tends to be generic to appeal to its heterogenous listener base.
- The deep specificity in the lyrics is what creates strong emotion. Gladwell compares “He stopped loving her today” by George Jones with “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. Jones’ song about a man who dies loving a woman who broke his heart is in itself heartbreaking. The Stones’s song is poetic and romantic, but somehow generates less empathy.
As music is about storytelling, you can maybe see where I’m going with this. If we accept that deep specificity suggests authenticity, thereby creating empathy, then deep specificity is a good tool for designers to use in creating and using design personas.
Some people are uncomfortable providing “useless detail” in their personas. The fear seems to come from being challenged about “how can we possibly know that about our users/customers?” Or, “who cares how many cats someone has?” Or simply, “who makes up this crap?”
They’re somewhat missing the point. Good design personas have two types of detail:
- Utilitarian information: informs designers as to what attributes (goals, needs, behaviours) are different from those of other personas. For example: organized; digitally proficient; prefers messaging to voice calls, etc.
- Deep specificity: makes personas memorable and more human, so design teams can relate to them.
Naming personas is a well-established example of specificity to create empathy. Teams tend to forget generic words and persona types like “business user” or “admin”. The descriptors are important as roles, but giving them names like “Tania” is the first step in forcing people to think of users as people.
People sometimes feel sheepish playing the imagination game and saying “I don’t think Tania would do that,” but it’s very important for design teams to buy into personas down to that level.
Design starts with empathy. No empathy, no design. Just feature development.
While you don’t want to load Tania with too much useless detail, more well-chosen “deep specificity” can raise her status from cardboard cutout to an actual person teams can empathize with. For example, instead of just describing Tania as a “technical business user”, try illustrating the attribute with storytelling.
What if we said:
“Proudest achievement: setting up and running her own e-commerce site selling sports team merchandise.”
It provides the same information, but the real-world detail is what makes Tania and her profile that much more memorable. That micro-story suggests that she is a non-coder, but confident and proficient using and managing systems for business purposes.
If you’ve gotten this far, the next time you’re putting a persona together, you may remember Tania and the e-commerce site she ran in college. You might even want to thank her for helping you to create more memorable personas…if you ever run into her someday.
David.p.Kohler 