The new black is Persona Spectrum. It helps in comprehending motivations and related mismatches across a range of situations. It helps in addressing a variety of users' demands, experiences, behaviours, and aspirations. When I already have user personas, why would I need a persona spectrum? Is it evocative of a riddle? Let's start by unravelling it, then.
2. Persona Spectrum is the new black. It aids in
understanding related mismatches and motivations
across a spectrum over different scenarios. It is
beneficial in dealing with a wide range of users’
needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.
Why use a persona spectrum when I already have
user personas? Does it feel like a riddle? Well, let’s
begin to unriddle it.
Introduction
3. Recapping User Personas: A user persona
represents a user type that might use your
services, products, sites, or brands similarly or
the other.
Insignificant Efforts on Research: Hypothesis
built based on a single persona due to lack of
effort on research can lead to single-use design
work. This defeats the purpose of leveraging
personas for customer-centric designs.
Low User Adoption and Acceptance: A product
design that captivates some and not others can
lead to product failure and low acceptance.
That is why there is a need to understand the
users’ emotions and make intelligent personas
so that the product is adopted and accepted.
4. Ineffective for Special Needs: Most of the time, user personas
represent an average user and do not consider people with special
needs like people with hearing disabilities or visually challenged.
Such a design is created for everyone but really no one at all.
Lack of Empathy: Empathy in a design is a must. The user’s
behavior should be considered to avoid any minute difference
between the emotions and practicality of design.
Enter Persona Spectrum: A persona spectrum empowers us to do
just that. It is a design methodology that enables one to draw from
the full range of human diversity by taking into account variations
revealing changes in users’ ambition and pain points.
5. Application of Persona Spectrum in
Real life: Amazon is known for its fast
and efficient delivery. But there was a
segment of users (working
professionals) dissatisfied. Amazon Hub
is a worldwide network of secure pickup
locations for your Amazon packages.
Amazon used the persona spectrum
strategy to solve mismatched
interaction between a person and a
system and helped them align to user
needs better.
6. Key takeaways of persona spectrum
Even persona spectrums can be inherently biased and
assumptive if not based on solid research and the kind
of empathy that comes from truly understanding a
user’s challenges. Here are some key takeaways
Focus on a range of customer motivations,
contexts, abilities, and circumstances.
‘Design with not for’ the customers.
Provides better services by being empathetic
towards them.