Transcripts
1. Personas are Overrated: A Practical Way to Understanding your Audience: Hi, I'm Jacob Magnll. I'm a product owner,
a service designer. Podcast told us stand
today. I'm your teacher. I want to talk about a topic that can be super
frustrating for people, and that is personas. Specifically, I want to go
into when personas work. They really don't and what the alternatives
are and how you can create something that is
better than a persona. If you have ever
created a persona to understand who your
target audience is, what you can do to create
better products or services, could be YouTube, video, or anything like that,
you might think that, Oh, this was really
complicated or even is really useful? The
short answer is no. If you're someone that wants
to create something, again, a product or a service, Art or YouTube videos or something that you want to
provide to an audience. Personas aren't
really made for that. Personas are made for
marketing and telling stories. And they've sort
of been co opted into becoming this design free for all thing that
you should be doing, but I'm here to tell you
that there are better ways. Personas, because they
come from marketing, often include a lot of details that you just
don't want to bother with when you're
designing a service or a product or an
offering of some sort. They often fail to
provide the insights that you need in order to develop the thing
in the first place. We still need to do something to communicate and visualize
the needs of our users, but there are much better
ways than personas. This course is created
to tell you how.
2. Course overview: To I will walk you through
a more practical and a better way of visualizing and talking about user needs
that will work for you when you're doing the creative
work that you want to do. I've put together pieces from different
approaches and combine that with the experiences
that I've had when creating products
over many years. So I'll take what I have learned
works in the real world, and I'll come dance that down and give that to
you in this course. The goal here is to
focus on what really matters and skip all
the details that don't really provide any
useful information for you at the stage
where you are in your creative work right now. If you want to dive
deeper into it, I'll add some resources, books and articles that I've found to be useful
when thinking about personas and other methods
of understanding user needs. I want to keep this
course fairly quick. I want you to be able
to just get this over with and start working
on this on your own. What we will do is
we will go through the basics of what a persona
is when and when you should use the persona,
and then we'll look at what I think
is a much better, more needs based version of a persona to just
help you get started. We will, of course, practice what we've learned by creating our own hypothesis
based user description. Then I'll talk about how
you can develop that further as you learn more
about your actual users. I would be really
happy if you wanted to share anything that you do in connection
to this course, any description of users
or their needs that you create in the
class project section. If you like this
course after you're done with it, please
leave a review. I hope you enjoy this
course. Let's dial right in.
3. Class project: Describe your project: For your class project, I want to start up with
some reflection. Think about what's
your niche and what is the general outline of what you're
trying to achieve. Write down the niche that you're trying to fit
into, whether it's art, whether you're trying to
create a new mobility app, or you want to create something that no one
has ever heard of. I don't know. If you are
a nuclear fusion expert and you want to create
a control room, this approach will
help you, as well. You can create the control
room for that using the needs based personas that I'm going to teach
you in this course. Just write down a sentence or two about what you're
trying to create. I have a tendency to expand
my projects as I go along. And then it can be really
good to loop back to that first initial
product description or service description of what
you're trying to achieve. It might be art, it might
be nature photography. You still need to understand who your viewers are and
which are your users. And I think just
being able to go back and look at that first
statement is fantastic. Sometimes you need to update
the statement because while exploring the target
audience through this course, you might find that
the people that I have in mind and that
I understand here, they're not really connecting with the topic of what
I'm trying to do. Well, then it might
be that you need to focus the topic a little bit. It's a little bit of
a back and forth. They are informing each other. Your understanding of the users and your understanding
of the product. Sometimes you will update the user description to
fit with the product. You might lose some users or add some other
users. That's fine. Sometimes you need to fix
your product description or your service description,
and that's fine, too. At any rate, just having that description is a way
of focusing your work and getting back to some more a little bit more focused when it comes to what
you're creating. If you feel like you're
spiraling out of control and you're
creating something that you didn't think you were, maybe you should go back and
cut some of your ideas to just make it more focused and better fit that
first description. Next is an exercise
for anyone that has already thought about
personas previously. I want to know your experience. How has it been working for
you to work on personas? Personally, I find it very difficult
sometimes to do that, especially if I'm early in a project and I don't
know much about my users. I might go out and
introdew some people, but then when I sit down
and I look at personas, can be a little bit tough to fit that into something
that feels useful. That's why I'm creative
in this course. If you love personas, please write that
in the description or in the class project, and we can have a look at that
and we can talk about it. So write that down on a piece of paper or on a Miro board, on a whiteboard,
and then we can use that as a starting
point for this project. And as we go through the class, you can just add more
information into that. It's just a good
starting point to have a little bit of a scope defined for what
you're trying to.
4. The problem with personas: So now we've talked
about personas, the classic persona, and I haven't really given you a
description of what it is. Personas were originally
for marketing. They're used as a
way to describe who you're targeting with ads. It's a really good tool
for selling something to a group of people in a
corporation, for example, if you're going to present something to a management group, someone that needs
to make a decision on what are we doing here? You might be a shoe designer, and you have sneakers
that you want to sell to the management
group so that they will make a decision
on whether they should market this shoe and produce so what you do then is you describe
high level a person, a specific person made
up most of the time, but that has some
use of your product. Maybe you have a walking
shoe and you're targeting, I don't know, dog owners. So you add things
like their age, their hobbies, their
lifestyle preferences, and just to create this rich description of a human being that might
be using a product. And you use that as essentially a storytelling device for
selling something to someone. Someone that needs
to make a decision, and you might even go further. You might add a story
about the typical day in the life of someone
that is using the product. So, for example, the dog owner needs to take on the shoes, and it's really frustrating, but then they buy the new shoes, and it's so much
easier and better. That's a way of communicating the value of
something to someone, but it's not really great for creating the value in the first
place because you have to have such detailed understanding
of the usage that it becomes a little bit unwieldy and hard to use and
hard to create. It's much easier if you
already have something valuable to make a description of someone that wants to use it. So it's a little
bit backwards for creating content or
products or services. When you've added all
these things together, you've filed a
detailed picture of a supposed typical user. That can be great. But
there's a problem with this. It might be great
for telling a story, maybe even as part of a book, but the person doesn't
exist in the real world, and you shouldn't
create products for such a specific
subset of people. If you're designing a
service or a product, especially in the beginning, your focus will be too narrow. It's going to be super hard
for you to expand that out to something that is useful for you when you're doing
your creative work. If you want to
emotionally connect with your audience and
you want to really sell something that you have
a good understanding for, and you just need them to
understand what the value is, then a persona is perfect. Then you can take that very detailed character that
you can show that, Oh, my app is fantastic
for this person. And therefore, it's fantastic. For many people, that's a little bit of the
logic on how to do it, but it's more of a
marketing tool than it is a creative help.
5. A needs based approach: So here's what I propose.
Let's cut away all the fluff and then we go for a needs based description of your users. Instead of getting caught up in the details and the nitty
gritty of a character, focus on what the
problem they have is and what that translates
to in terms of needs. So instead of creating elaborate backstory
and understanding everything about the characters, family situation, instead just focus on
the specific need that they're trying to solve
that you think you can meet with your
creative work. A need is a specific problem that your users are
going to want to solve, a specific thing that they want happen when using your service or product or creative work. For example, if you're
creating an application for helping people manage their time when
they're on the go, you don't really need
to know that they're dog owners or their
work history. You just need to know that
they're looking for a way to organize their hectic schedule while they're on the
go. That is their need. It's a simple description
of their needs, and you might need to
develop that further, but for a first draft, that might actually be okay. The important thing here
is that we write it down and can come back to it
to see what we're doing. So let me give you an example, and I'm going to base
it on this course. That means that I'm
going to try to describe the needs
of my audience. It might not fit you personally, but I'm hoping that it will be an okay representation
of why people come to this course to look at this content and what I
can do to give them value. So I have a set of
three assumptions, and I'm just going to
read them for you. Assumption one, my students are here because they
want to learn how to describe user needs in a way that's practical for
creating something, whether that's a product, a service, or a
piece of content. Assumption two, they're
interested in what someone with professional experience
has to say about simplifying the process
of creating personas. So I'm assuming that
some of you, at least, will have tried out
personas and thought that, Oh, this is quite hard. This one, I feel like I've
done the most research before. I've actually asked around
a little bit, Okay, if I did a persona course or a user needs description course, what would be the thing
that you were looking for, and that one is based off of. It's okay that these
are assumptions now. We will later go back
and verify that, Okay, this is still working, we can expand on that
and make it so that it has more resolution and
it is more accurate. The third assumption is they want concise and
actionable information. I believe you're not here to learn everything I have to
say about service design. I think you are here
in order to get short and concise information about personas, why
they don't work. And then what can you do
that I think is better? Let's try that out and continue with the course and
see where we end up. And then I would be super excited if you wanted to go into the description
and tell me that, Okay, yeah, one and
two really fit me, but number three was
not for me at all. Or, oh, actually, I came
to this course because I'm bored and I just want to look at someone talk
for 25 minutes. Either of those are
fine. What that will do is it will help me give more data that I can base an
update of my assumption on. It's of course, possible for me to go back
and fix this course, but what it will mainly
do is it will help me create another course that
will fit you guys better. I want to highlight
something that I've sort of touched on before that all of these hypotheses are
very wide and very general. What that means is that it might not be very specific
to my target audience. At some point, I might
want to narrow it down. The way I do that is by
iterating this by going back, looking at my assumptions, talking to you guys,
getting more information, asking you to write
in the comments, whether the hypotheses
work for you or if you have another
reason to come here. Then I can update that. That's the main takeaway. If you leave now and
you don't want to have any more specific
tips on how to do things, what I want to leave you
with is create a hypothesis, and then regularly, like, often update that
and look at it, make sure that you understand and think that this
is still accurate. That's the most
powerful thing you can do to understand your
users over the long term, and you have to look at this
as a longer term project, but you can start acting
on an early idea. You can create some content
or a product, application. And then as you update that you show what
you've done to people, you can update your
hypothesis, as well, and then you can change the app, but you can go out again. So it's a work that
takes a little while, but it will steer you
in the right direction, which is the whole
purpose of this exercise. And it might look a
little bit underwhelming, but the beauty of this is that you're not losing
anything when you update this. If you have a beautiful persona with images and
background information, you might feel
like, Oh, I need to take care of this
and cherish it. This, you can just update, and that's how you get further, faster when you're
doing your project.
6. Class project: Your assumptions, and get feedback: So here's what I want you
to do for your project. I want you to write down three assumptions
about your users. You can look at my examples
of viewers of this course, and then you can modify
that and make some for your own project
or your own business. When you've done that, we get
into the really cool part. This is when I want you to go out and talk to a
couple of people. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to
be real users of your product because you
might not have anything yet. But you can just go to
people that you think would fit roughly into this category of people and just
ask them if you can't find someone that fits into
your user description, can go to just about
anyone that you trust and can have a dialogue with and
just bounce around ideas. Okay, so I have this
idea for a project. You go back to the
project description, and then you look
at your hypothesis. Do you think that this works? Is it reasonable for
me to think that this hypothesis will
work for this project? It's all about getting us or feedback in one
way or another. When you have more, it's going to be easier because
you can show your artifacts to
people and have them bounce around ideas
on your assumptions. But you can start already now by just talking and
discussing with friends or colleagues or family
just to see if you have a rough trajectory that works. Just checking with some
people if your assumptions are sound goes a
really long way. Then you can start to
work on a project, check whether people like it, and if they don't, you can
talk about what did you like? What did you not like? How
is this making you feel? Do you feel like this song's
your issue, stuff like that? And then you can update your
assumption based on that. So just below your
initial assumption, now that you've spoken
to one or two people and had a chance to
mull things over. I want you to go in and under
your previous assumptions, update your assumptions or
just move them down because, yeah, you still think
that these are valid.
7. The value of a work in progress: It's really important here
that we understand one thing, and that is that
we are not done. It's not about validating
these assumptions. It's about questioning
them and updating them. It's not about making sure
that we've come up with the best set of assumptions
to describe our users. No, it's about making sure
that we can update it quickly, and we can do quick
iterations to make fast progress towards
doing something that is great. Either way, by doing
this, already here, you've come a long way to understanding your
users and their needs.
8. Give me feedback on my assumptions: I would like to have some
feedback from my course. If you can go back and look at my assumptions and answer
the questions that I ask, like, does this fit for you? Did you have any
other reason for coming into this
course and looking? Again, you might be bored, and that's the reason
why you're here. That's fine. I
just want to know. So if you can do that,
promise you that in a couple of weeks
when I've received some feedback on my assumptions, I'm going to make a follow up video that I'm
going to attach to the end of this course and just make sure that
I update you on, okay these are my
new assumptions based on the feedback
I got from you. And you can see how that works. I'm really looking
forward to that. That's going to be a
really fun project for me, and you'll learn
something on the way
9. Its ok to be wrong – and learn: And I just want to
go back because this is a really important
point to make. It's okay to be wrong here. One of the things I have
a problem with personas, especially early in the
development process is that when you create a persona and
craft this very well, like, intense story about
someone and you add images, and you make sure
that it looks great. It becomes hard to update it, your understanding of your users should be constantly evolving. Not only is your
understanding evolving, but your users
might be evolving. You need to keep checking in to see whether you're still
on the right track. For me, that the secret to doing anything
in this space really well. Like any creative work, you need to look at
your users and see, Okay, do I still
understand them? Do I know what's happening here? Make user needs description
that is very rough, but that is easy to update.
10. Class summary: Here's a quick summary
of the key steps. Focus on needs, not on
personal descriptions. Forget about the backstory, additional facts, hair color. Just focus on what are
they trying to achieve. Why are they here? What
are they trying to do? Write down your assumptions. If you don't have stuff
written down like this, it's really hard to keep
yourself accountable. Make sure that you have
a good place where you revisit this often
throughout your project. And then check it out to see whether your
assumptions will change. Have regular meetings. If you are separate
people in the project, make sure you talk
about this stuff because it's really important. Number three, test and
gather feedback without talking to your users
or presumptive users, it's going to be really hard
to update your assumptions. So make sure that you
get out there and you test your
hypothesis by showing things and talking
about things and exploring how you can
meet their needs. That's the key step
in this process. Then you can iterate and refine. Once you have the
better understanding, you can refine it, you
can make it more detail. Maybe your needs
descriptions become longer because you want
them to be more specific. That's fantastic. They still
need to be updateable. You can't fall in
love with them too much because then they
lose their purpose, but as long as you feel
okay with changing it, it's okay to go
into more detail. So again, the main thing
that I want you to take away from this course is that
be okay with iterating, be okay with updating. Your latest understanding
of your users won't be your last
understanding of your users. Bring in that information
to your next project or update your existing project
with that new information. It's going to help
you get a long way towards providing real
value to your users. This approach is all about not getting stuck into details, and then making sure that you create a process that will
grow with your product and project rather than
something you need to wedge into your
project at weird times. I think that's
going to help you. When you've created
your project and when you're done with
it, by all means, do create a persona
that is fantastic, that is beautiful, that have
all the sort of artifacts. You have a story, a backstory.
You have a picture. You might even do
some illustrations. You take a photo of a house that you think
this person could live in. Add that to the
persona description. If the purpose is marketing
and telling a story, a persona is great. I use it all the time for that, but not for developing things. It's too slow and too rigid.
11. Outro: Hope that you find this approach
as useful as I find it. I love looking into user needs and understanding who I'm creating products for. Letting go of personas
can be a little bit scary because it's such a
staple of design. People know about personas and they want you to create one. I want you to challenge that and try to just describe the user needs
and go from there. I think it's a much more productive way of
using your time. Get started. I want
to see your projects. I want to make sure
that I understand what your users are after. Therefore, create
your description of your project object and then come with the first hypothesis, go out and talk to
some people, and then update your hypothesis. That's all you need to do,
and it's really effective. If you can give me some
feedback on this course. If you liked it, I would
love having reviews. That really helps
me get out here on the platform to share everything that I want
to share with everyone. Thank you for joining
me in this course. I'm excited to see how you do. Let me know any feedback, any discussion that you want to write it here on the platform, and I'm super happy
to engage with you. Have a great day. My name
is Jacob Magnol. Bye.
Jacob Magnell, Service Designer, Innovation Strategist
