Why bother with personas? Why not "users"? Because the way you see someone shapes the way you design for them. We are accustomed to referring to people by their roles, but this practice is dehumanizing. When you use role labels, you quickly forget that these are real people, just like your family or friends. And just like your acquaintances, these real people have different abilities, behaviors, and needs.
There is good psychological evidence that our brains are wired to empathize more easily with individuals than with groups. In this video, William Hudson, User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd, presents the evidence.
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There's quite a lot of psychological evidence that empathy is geared towards individuals. And I want to talk about two long-standing research studies. One from 1983 by David Sears, called "The Person Positivity Bias", where he presented two sets of participants with exactly the same attributes. One set of participants was told that these attributes applied to a person,
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an individual, and the other group of participants was told that these attributes applied to multiple people. And the participants who thought they were having the descriptions of individuals thought more highly of those individuals than the other participants did of the groups. So, that is pretty strong evidence for the person positivity bias, as he called it. The second study is by Nordgren and McDonnell, and they established that the reactions to a fraud were more severe
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when it was presented with only three victims rather than 30. The two sets of participants were given exactly the same details, but one set was told that it was only three victims, and the other set was told that it was 30, and the three victims thought it was a more heinous crime and actually gave the perpetrators a longer prison sentence when asked.
When you design for a specific person, the benefits don’t stop with psychological effects. If you treat your personas as individuals, you will make them more concrete in terms of the needs and behaviors you've established through research. Otherwise, "users" as a group are infinitely flexible! That's why you quickly lose focus when you design for users rather than personas.
Cognitive Empathy: Why Personas Matter
Cognitive empathy, the appreciation that other people may see or understand things differently, is also a human characteristic that comes into play. The phrase "you are not the user" captures a persistent issue in creating user-centered products and services.
“You are not the user” can be a challenging idea for software development teams or technology-driven organizations. In this video, William discusses his research on cognitive empathy in the IT industry.
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I've worked in software engineering for more than 50 years now, and for the last 30 or so, I've been involved in HCI and user interface design. And one thing that puzzled me when I made that shift into the user side of things, the light side, if you like, as opposed to the dark side of pure software engineering, is that a lot of people just didn't get that you had to understand users,
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that users actually were different people, they could be different people, that they had different problems and a different way of looking at things. And I became very interested in this topic and started to do some research after I did my own postgraduate diploma in psychological research methods, and discovered that there were very many instruments used for measuring autism. So, this study was based on work from the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, and it's one
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that I did back in—I did it around about 2005, but I had 450 respondents. I think about two-thirds of them, roughly, were female, and one-third were male. And I asked them to fill out the Autism Research Centre's questionnaires on systemizing and empathizing. That's how the two questionnaires are labeled, and you can find out all about this just by doing a Google search on those particular terms. And what I discovered is shown in this summary slide. It shows
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the empathizing and systemizing quotients from these questionnaires. So, the EQ is empathizing, and you can think of that as empathizing skills, and the SQ line, which is the solid one, you can think of as systemizing skills. And the scale across the bottom runs from people-oriented at the low end, the left-hand side here, so people-oriented roles in IT were those who were involved in usability, in documentation writing, technical writing, maybe even customer support, people who were
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customer-facing, people-facing, and the other end of this axis is the right-hand end, labeled number five, technology-oriented. And all I asked respondents to do after they'd completed these questionnaires was to indicate where on this scale of 1 to 5 they felt they fitted in terms of the work that they did. Now, clearly, some people were in the middle, as you can see from the crossover there. But have a look what happened with, um, the empathizing quotient when
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we move from people-oriented roles over to the right towards technology-oriented roles. That EQ takes a really drastic plunge from about the middle onwards, and we're not too far, when we get to 0.5 on this bottom scale, from suspicions of being on the autism spectrum. What this shows is that we have reduced empathy for those in IT working at
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the technology-oriented end of the scale, and that results in a well-known issue in autism spectrum research to do with low cognitive empathy. So, the reason I was discovering that my high-tech colleagues were having hard problems understanding users is that they actually have hard problems understanding other people's points of view. They're—they're very prone to believing that there is only one way of looking at a problem or solving a problem, and it's the way that their brain
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naturally works. So, that's a very interesting issue with neurodiversity, but in this case, it means that we're actually somewhat excluding the real point when it comes to user-centered design, that we need to go out and talk to real users to find out what's really going on there.
As mentioned in the video, William used standardized questionnaires from autism research for his study. He discovered that people who work on the more technical side of IT exhibit lower cognitive empathy. The questionnaires measured empathy as the "EQ," or empathy quotient.
The original study, summarized below, shows a distinct downward trend for EQ as participants moved into more technology-oriented roles. Conversely, the systemizing quotient, "SQ," is higher for men and women who identify as working primarily in technical roles within IT.
This discovery aligns with expectations, except for the final point on the P-T (People-Technology) scale for women. Here, we see a sudden drop in both EQ and SQ. The anomaly may be due to the relatively small number of women working primarily in technology. The situation is further complicated by the social pressures on women to be empathetic and sociable, an issue William discusses in the article Asperger's Syndrome, Autism and Camouflaging.
The original study and the later article are in the references section below.
William’s study showed that men with more technology-oriented roles in the IT industry demonstrated lower cognitive empathy in self-reported assessments. The results for women with more technology-oriented roles are inconclusive, likely due to the low number of technology-oriented respondents.
As designers, we solve problems for humans—real, complex humans with individual behaviors and needs. This is why we advocate for personas. They are a crucial tool in user-centered design, helping shift away from the generic and impersonal "users" to a more specific, individualized approach. There are several justifications for this from a psychological perspective:
Human empathy is associated with individuals, not groups.
Team members may have conflicting or unrealistic ideas about the needs and behaviors of users.
Research shows that individuals in technology-focused roles may struggle to recognize that not everyone shares their level of technical skills and understanding.
Personas help address these issues. They make users more real, with specific behaviors and needs, and are designed to emphasize a solution's important features. This emphasis makes it easier to prioritize limited development resources.
When you’re in the beginning stages of your design project and you have just finished some highly informative interviews
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