The role of empathy and personas

Empathy, the ability to see things from the perspective of the user - to better understand their lives, needs, motivations, pain points, feelings, and experiences - is fundamental to building and marketing valued products and services. The more empathy you have for your users the easier it is to intuitively shape and tailor products, services, experiences, and communications to match their situation, needs and mindset.

Personas, as depictions of users - their lives, personalities, motivations and feelings - have long been one of the tools used by design and marketing teams to build empathy with customers. But despite greater empathy being one of the key goals of Personas they are often neglected for not going beyond surface-level illustrations of users - feeling over simplistic, two-dimensional, lacking insight and crucially, not being believable. And, if you and your colleagues don’t believe the people shown in Personas are real, it’s going to be hard to really bond with them and care about what they need.

Personas as a concept are not at fault here, it’s the often fixed idea of what content and format they should be that is the problem. We need to go beyond the comfort zone of the usual single-page templates and canvasses, get creative and flex the content and format into new directions. This is the starting point in making Personas more insightful, actionable, powerful.

So let’s crack on and take a look at five ways that you can generate more empathy from your Personas:

1. Base Personas on real people…and the right people

This is a fundamental one. For your personas to be believable and engaging, to go from 2D to 3D, they need to be based on real people and the lives they lead. Authentic Personas have personalities, emotions, feelings, experiences and quirks that you won’t discover without observing and speaking to real people. To create authentic, not fictional Personas, research with your target audience is a must.

Whilst the need for research should be clear, there are many articles, blog posts and chapters written where the creation of Personas is described as something brainstormed in a workshop or created collaboratively on a virtual whiteboard. Yes, this process might build in insight and learning from past research but this is can be quite anecdotal, prone to bias and characterisation. These Personas are then fleshed out with fake profiles, stock photographs, made-up quotes and non-existent experiences, making them feel even more unreal. Design teams designing the Personas they use to inspire the products and services they build seems like an attempt to bypass not embed customer empathy. This approach is in no way customer-centric or human-centered, and will be unlikely to result in a fresh breakthrough idea.

So independent primary research with real people is a must. You also need to make sure that persona research is conducted with the right people or you might end up building affinity and creating experiences for people with no interest in, or fit for, your product, service, or brand. We’d recommend conducting a market survey to identify people who have a need and desire for your proposition, segmenting these into different groups based on needs, and then recruiting at least 2 people per segment to be your personas. Mix-methods research is recommended to give the breadth, depth, and closeness needed for a fleshed-out and impactful persona with real stories to share - a combination of profiling survey, ethnographic diary and interviews is a project mix we’ve found works well.

2. Get closer to Personas’ in-the-moment experiences

As humans, we’re often bad at remembering our true behaviour, feelings and experiences after the moment has passed. This is especially true of the small moments, where we’re on auto-pilot, multi-tasking or quickly moving on to the next thing in our packed-out lives. But these touchpoints and micro-moments can be crucial in getting to know your Personas, especially their behaviour, decision-making processes and feelings at key moments of truth, e.g. choosing products for an online grocery shop, choosing what to watch on your streaming service, completing on online booking, etc.

To overcome this and to also collect evidence and insightful nuggets (eg stories, photos, videos, screengrabs), we recommend a diary study with your Persona research participants. This diary could be a standalone project, or a ‘pre-task’ to a contextual inquiry interview, where you ask research participants to post experiences, reviews or feedback as they complete steps in a journey or when using a specific product / service. This in-the-moment feedback and resulting quotes, photos or videos will be much more authentic, insightful and packed with feeling than a recalled experience in an interview. What you learn from these diaries can also be used as a springboard in follow-up interviews, creating more focused discussions and actionable knowledge.

Using a mobile ethnographic app (or WhatsApp if you’re on a budget) for the diary allows research participants to share text quotes, photos, videos and screen-shares in-the-moment. They can categorise their posts, state their sentiment and highlight pains, gains or unmet needs at each stage. These insights and related research artifacts can be embedded in the Personas to add colour and bring them to life.

3. Add Empathy Maps related to key journeys

Like Personas, Empathy maps aim to create a better understanding of users and their needs, distilling and communicating insights about a scenario, journey or experience into a simple visualisation. Empathy Maps have sometimes been positioned as an alternative to Personas but we see them as complementary and additive, not competing frameworks.

For those less familiar with Empathy maps, these simple visualisations provide an overview of how a persona behaves, reacts and feels in a given scenario or when looking to complete a particular Job (to be done). The Persona would be given a scenario - something to achieve or need - and you would then assess and visualise how they:

Think & Feel: What are they thinking as they go through the scenario? What emotions are they feeling?
For example, what specific factors are they thinking about (e.g. pains, gains, concerns) and how does this impact their emotions (e.g. excited, anxious, confident, etc)
See & Hear: What are they seeing and hearing in the market, the media and from peers that influences them?
For example, what is the consensus about which brands or products are good or bad, what is the best choice to make and way to go about it. And, where are they seeing and hearing this?
Say: What are they saying to others as they go through the scenario? And who are they saying it to?
For example, what questions are they asking to help them make a choice and make progress? And, who are they asking the questions of?
Do: What is their behaviour when looking to make progress in the scenario? What do they do and in what order?
For example, what are the steps, touchpoints and timings involved in a user making a choice for a new service provider, from awareness through to sign-up?

Including Empathy maps in your multi-page Personas will provide a scenario for your archetype to experience along with the insights that can be acted upon to deliver a better experience. Armed with this knowledge, your teams will have much greater knowledge and feel for how to create value and better experiences for them.

4. Use video to bring personas to life

Another benefit of building Personas based on research, is the ability to gather videos of participants spontaneously sharing their lives, motivations, experiences and opinions. Whether it’s the context of a situation, sharing actual examples of experiences or just the amount of feeling included in posts, videos are inherently more effective at building empathy.

Here are a few ideas of video tasks you could ask your Persona research participants to respond to, via your mobile ethnographic app or using a dedicated app like VideoAsk:

Please record a short video, telling us which app you have on your mobile you would miss most if it was no longer available? Tell us why you would miss it.
Please record a screen-share of your mobile, showing us which shopping apps you have installed - tell us how often you use each app, which you like the most and why.
At any point across the next 7 days, please record and share a short video about any particularly good or bad experiences you have when interacting with an online service, e.g. bank, finance, utility, shops.
Please visit [site / app]. Screen-share and talk us through your experience and opinions, when looking to [relevant task]

Video clips from the responses to questions like these are powerful additions to Personas, providing much more insight and creating more empathy than a headshot and some quotes alone.

5. Bring it all together in a persona website

I’ve mentioned how the constraints of one-page Personas can limit the empathy they generate. Taking this a step further, you really don’t even need something that is a document, print-out, or poster. We’ve found that you can really power up the empathy stemming from your Personas by creating a website that alongside the content already mentioned, includes a mix of media (photos, videos, screen-shares, diary entries) to explore and interact with.

As well as being a much more immersive experience for improving customer closeness, a website can live beyond the original piece of research and evolve, with Personas fleshed out and iterated as you hear new stories, discover new insights, and gather more evidence. These rich Personas, that go beyond the surface, will provide extra depth and actionability and could provide the fuel and spark for that next great product, service and feature.

Using platforms like Sharepoint or Squarespace, this doesn’t need to be an expensive extra or involve significant development time. And, with the right platform, it should be fully responsive so your Personas are always at hand: on your mobile, at your desk or on the big screen in your next workshop.

Wait, there’s more…

We hope this has provided some inspiration for how you can enhance and augment Personas to improve customer closeness and build empathy. We’ve also written a partner piece to this article focused on how to make Personas more actionable ’5 ways to enhance your Personas: For Action’ which you can read via our Insight Thinking page.

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