Design for people, not personas

Brands increasingly realize that they need to be inclusive, accessible and social to remain relevant and successful, especially among a younger audience. But that takes time and effort, from both brand and designer, and requires an overhaul of the Design Thinking method. Why?

• Empathize is not enough; you cannot truly know what it is like to be different. Therefore, your interpretation is always different from the experience of the user for whom you are designing.
• Using personas in Define is a wash. It is an average user, a fiction that does not do justice to the diversity of real users.
• Test on those same averages and you deprive yourself of the valuable insights of people who are different from you or your customer.
• So look for people who are different in as many ways as possible, and engage them at every stage of your process through human centered co-design.

Want to know more? Then read on quickly.

Every year there are new students or start-ups presenting an app, glove, AR glasses or other device that aims to provide a solution for translating sign language into spoken language. Often they go viral and the inventors get a lot of attention and praise for their efforts. But have they ever asked deaf people about their problems? Do we have any problems at all that need to be solved? Are deaf people really involved in the design process? Looking at the outcomes, I believe little of it.

I do not at all want to detract from their good intentions, quite the contrary. But as a hearing person, one can simply never fully empathize with a deaf person. Nor vice versa, for that matter. As far as I am concerned, it is the biggest misconception about the first step in the Design Thinking model: Empathize. Empathy goes beyond just "pretending," by briefly putting yourself in someone else's shoes, for example by temporarily making yourself blind or deaf with glasses or headphones. You feel disoriented, anxious and severely disabled. But if you were born deaf or blind or have been able to get used to it for a lifetime then it is very different; then it is normal.

By designing from a superficial understanding of the target audience's experience, you run the risk of achieving the opposite of your good intentions. Instead of making it accessible, you marginalize the user experience and exclude users from the design process. This principle is also known as the Design Savior Complex.

I would therefore urge designers and clients to engage in conversation, to ask, to check and to keep the dialogue going. That way you avoid making wrong assumptions about the people they are designing for. For example, start by asking whether the deaf actually need help with communication.

As far as I am concerned, this is also about emancipation of people with disabilities. Because even when they do get actively involved in the development of a solution, they rarely get credit for it. They are never the co-creators, they never come to the fore. It seems mostly as if they are used for the nice story: "Look what we created to help these pathetic people!"

I lived and worked in France for a while and made good friends there. What always strikes me is how strongly French deaf people identify with their disability, they are proud of it! From that self-awareness they know very well what they need, what their rights are, they stand up for it and are very outspoken about it. I find that something very beautiful and powerful but it also gives me an inner struggle. Being deaf is of course part of my identity, but I am also a woman, an Amsterdam native, a UX designer, a teacher at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, someone with a passion for kitesurfing. There are so many facets to me that I am uncomfortable with an identity that is so explicitly tied to my being deaf.

All my life I have had to fight to be accepted and seen, to just get along in society and prove that I can do as much as 'normal' people. At the same time, I have slowly come to realize that it is also beautiful to be able to see yourself as 'different,' that it makes you a little bit special. I still have a long way to go to embrace that part of my identity, to be proud of it. But since I don't know any better than not hearing anything, it doesn't feel like a limitation either. It is the environment that makes me feel limited by being ignorant and inaccessible.

That brings me to the second step in the Design Thinking process: Define. Starting from an understanding of the target audience, in this phase you formulate its needs and problems. A popular tool in human-centered design for this is the persona: fictional characters you create to represent the different user types. The personas should help the designer understand their needs, experiences, behaviors and goals.

Of course, it is very practical to assemble large groups of users with many similarities into a persona and base your design on that. The result is only that you design for those one or two personas that describe the averages. But an average user, that doesn't exist at all. And an even greater disadvantage is that you thereby exclude large groups of "un-average" users.

I think it is very positive that there is growing awareness about the importance of inclusiveness. I also think there is a task for designers to make that awareness more visible and practical towards inclusive communication, interaction, products and services. But if personas are not a good tool in that, what is?

I advocate a kind of co-design. By working not with personas but with real, live people. Follow them on social media, engage with them, test your assumptions, try to understand them and challenge them to come up with their own solutions. Only then can you really empathize and together arrive at truly human centered design, rather than some kind of persona centered design.

The very best thing, of course, is to have more diverse teams with members who can come up with solutions that work for everyone from their backgrounds, identities and life experiences. At Unc Inc, for example, we had a client who had asked us to remove the contact form from the app simply because no one in the organization checks the mailbox where these emails end up. But for a deaf person, that's a barrier: I have to open my interpreter contact app, enter the number, wait for an answer. So much hassle, I often don't feel like it at all. So not a good idea if accessibility is a pillar of your policy (and a legal requirement). So if I hadn't been on that team, the contact form would have been taken out. By the way, there are also plenty of hearing people who prefer not to call, for example because they (think they) do not master the Dutch language well enough and prefer to use a translation app :-)

Things also often go wrong in the final phase of the design process: the Test. Functional testing can be costly and is often seen as a last resort. After all, many clients are primarily concerned with getting as much functionality as possible for their money. But especially if no users have been consulted who are substantially different from you, there is room for that very human tendency to self-assertion: "This is going to be a great success." Then, when they start looking for reasons for the lack of conversion on their projections, they find themselves again.

And when a product does undergo functional testing, it is often by that same average user. And that while feedback from the "deviant" user is often a far greater contributor to quality for all users (see also the Business Case for Accessibility).

Within sight of delivery (and deadline), practical considerations also often play a role, especially if you are not well prepared. For example, this was the case with one of our other clients. For them we had built a platform on which they could exchange knowledge and information with thousands of volunteers, in addition to a limited number of professionals. But because it was much easier and faster to recruit test users among the latter group, the platform was not tested by the platform's primary target group: the volunteers.

My conclusion is that a design is never fully accessible to everyone. It's never universal; there will always be users for whom a product doesn't work as well. But whether for moral or commercial reasons, it pays to talk to real people, outside your own bubble or that of your client, and ask them what they really need. Don't consider those people as edge cases, as exceptions, but make them part of your design process so they can help you improve the outcome for everyone.

In this article, I mainly gave context and critique on the application of Design Thinking. In a future article, I will deepen this more and give practical tips on how to achieve good and more inclusive design without personas.

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