Personas vs Archetypes; How we use them to influence our design decisions
Personas and archetypes are often misunderstood and misused. Here’s my hot take and how to get the most out of these tools 🔥👇
TL;DR… IMO archetypes are a much better tool for informing your daily design decisions, by revealing the different ‘missions’ a customer may be on at any given time, and thinking about these holistically across your end to end experience.
Personas are becoming a tick box exercise
There’s still a lot of debate about the use of personas in UX design. I often see them in interviewee case studies with little explanation as to why they were created, or how they’ve been used to inform or influence design decisions throughout the product development cycle. They seem to appear more as a tick box exercise towards the end of the research phase, but rarely do they surface again when it comes to ideation, user testing, or hypothesis creation. And when designers are asked why they created the persona, few have a reasonable answer.
However, over the last few years the teams I’ve worked with have started using Archetypes exclusively to inform our daily design decisions across our product experience. Why? Let me explain by first describing the role of a persona.
The true value of a persona
The value of a persona often lies in the stakeholders you need to influence and educate within your organisation, and how biased they are towards their own opinions and ideas.
This usually happens early on in the product process, I.e during the discovery phase, when you need to share a summary of the research you’ve undertaken. I’ve certainly found personas a useful tool in this scenario, once you’ve conducted demographic research that helps you understand who your core user is, their needs, motivations, frustrations and goals, and now want to share what you have learned with the wider team.
At this stage, personas become a tool you can use to help educate less familiar stakeholders about your target users needs, to challenge them to think from another’s perspective and challenge their own assumptions. I’ve used them with varying degrees of success in the past to do this, working closely with people in your organisation who have strong opinions, where you need to help them think from the users perspective.
My advice is to keep your personas simple, relevant (by only outlining preferences that are critical to your product or business), and concise. Don’t focus on irrelevant information that you’ll never use, instead zoom in to their needs, motivations and frustrations.
You may need to repeat this education again and again along the design process to keep bringing your stakeholders opinions back to your actual users needs. I’ve done this by challenging their opinions during ideation, saying things such as “Imagine you were ‘persona A’, would you really care about X, or would you care about Y”? Or running ideation workshops around each specific persona, even bringing in real users who fit that demographic.
Archetypes let you break down your users core needs into missions
Archetypes, however, are way more nuanced and specific (compared to personas) when it comes to making key decisions about features or strategic direction within your product.
They do this by understanding and describing the individual ‘missions’ (a mission could also be described as a job-to-be-done) your users may be on at any given time. The important thing to understand here is that a customer will likely be on multiple missions, either over a period of time, or all at the same time. Archetypes let you describe these specific missions and user’s sub-needs within them.
Imagine you’re grocery shopping…
Let’s take grocery shopping for example. A customers mission could vary from ‘deal hunting’, to ‘indulgent treat’, or ‘being healthy’. Their needs, goals and motivations will change depending on the mission they’re on, and archetypes let you understand these in detail, by ‘mission’ rather than by ‘persona’. For example it would be untrue to classify a persona into any of these categories as no one is 100% on an ‘indulgent treat’ mission, but are likely to be a mix of all 3.
Instead, archetypes allow you to see how a customer can be on all 3 ‘missions’ at the same time. One second you’re topping up on fruit and veg looking for all the best deals (deal hunting mission), the next you’re planning the kids lunches (being healthy mission) and then you’re buying a Saturday night treat (indulgent treat). This could all be during one single shopping trip to your local supermarket.
Archetypes let you focus on these horizontal, end to end missions, designing holistic experiences that serve the specific needs of that mission. Customers can then jump between those missions whenever they like during their experience with your brand. This is what I find most useful about archetypes, how they encourage end to end thinking about specific customer journeys, features and experiences that helps serve their underlying goals and needs.
Archetypes help you prioritise and test ideas
By creating archetypes based on customer missions, you’re in a much better position to influence and prioritise features based on the mission they need to serve. You can discuss the importance (I.e. the size of the user problem, the number of users impacted, and therefore the commercial opportunity) of building a feature for a health based mission vs a deal hunting mission, for example.
You can also imagine how the size of these missions will alter throughout the year, for example at Valentines day, more customers are likely to be on an ‘indulgent’ mission and fewer on a ‘healthy eating’ one. This can help you prioritise features and experiences for this occasion.
Finally, you can also use archetypes to recruit user testing participants based on the specific mission they have in mind. You can begin to focus in on customers who are on a health mission, understanding their specific needs, and building end to end experiences around what they need. By tailoring your screening questions you can easily find these users and dig deeper into their goals and motivations.
Archetypes have transformed the way I think about designing end to end customer experiences, and how customers nowadays are multifaceted.
Your experience needs to be adaptable, able to serve many different needs, but at the same time focused on solving only the most important and impactful need at that given time.
Sounds like a good challenge to solve, right!?
