That’s not right at all
Why UX designers don’t rely on assumptions when developing personas
This article is day 15 of a 31 day series. A mash-up of the Inktober 2022 prompt list and UX terminology. Read more about the challenge here.
Day 15 | Inktober prompt: Armadillo | UX Term: Personas
“That’s a funny place to take a nap.” — Some dad somewhere, driving past some roadkill.
I can recall seeing one living armadillo in my life. And a lot of dead ones. It’s sad, but true. My understanding is that they don’t really like being around people and are more likely to hide if they know you’re around, so it makes sense. We don’t see them that much, because they’re elusive. Like bigfoot. I guess bigfoot is just better at dodging cars.
It’s easy to make my own assumptions about armadillos. It’s not like it comes up in conversation much. I’ve never been asked to make decisions about what is best for armadillos, and I’m not currently developing a product to solve an armadillo problem.
But what if I was?
Here we go again
I wrote an piece about personas about three weeks ago. I wasn’t thinking about Inktober when I did it. I was simply exploring something that was on my mind. And now I have to visit a topic I’ve already covered, but make it feel brand new. So today we’re getting hands-on in a totally made up way. I hope it’s still informative, but mostly I hope it’s fun.
First, in an effort to learn from mistakes. Let’s make some. Let’s say we’re developing an app that aims to solve the problem of armadillos getting hit by cars. We decide that we’ll define a persona so that we can make decisions that are focused on the user. Yes, the armadillo is the user in this scenario. Remember, we’re having fun.
We’re pretty much subject matter experts because we’ve seen a lot of armadillos on the side of the road, so we’re going to just go ahead and make this thing so we can get started.
First, we always see armadillos on their backs. They must be napping when they get hit, that explains it. So the problem we’re solving is that we need to make sure they don’t take naps on the side of the road. We’ll make our persona to support that.
Meet Amy Armadillo
“I really want to sleep when I’m tired.” — Amy
Age: 3 years old
Location: Austin, TX
Bio: Amy is an independent lady-armadillo (maybe, not sure how to tell). She lives in a hole probably, but also likes to roam around. After a long day of roaming she’ll relax wherever it’s convenient.
Wants & Needs:
- sleep
- convenient resting spots
Frustrations
- getting hit by cars while she’s napping
- not finding a cozy spot when she needs it
Now, we reference this persona, and we develop our app. We build a map feature that highlights nap spots that are cozy that are away from the road. Yay! Launch that thing!
It’s a few weeks later, and the app is getting in front of users!
And then the worst possible thing happens. We find our user… on the side of the road…. and they are not napping.
What happened?
Here’s where it went wrong
I know you’re not surprised, I told you we were going to make some mistakes. Now let’s figure out why it was wrong, and what we can do better.
The big one? We didn’t research. We just used our own assumptions, based on our own experiences. This is a common temptation in app development, and it’s one of the ways that a project can go to the shitter.
If we’d done research on armadillos, like at all, we might have found this article from armadillo-online.org that talks about armadillos eating roadkill at times. And explaining that animals that eat roadkill, often become roadkill. Also, they are nocturnal, and I don’t know if you’ve been out at night recently, but it can be dark. And apparently they jump when they’re startled, they don’t run away, like we thought. That might do a great job of startling a predator, but cars don’t startle that easy.
So even having this little bit of extra information could change the game. These weren’t sleepy creatures taking a nap at the worst possible place. They were trying to survive. Why didn’t the app keep them from ending up on the side of the road? Because they still had to eat, so while their nap time might have been super cozy off the road, they still ended up back at the road munching down.
And boom!
Takeaway
While trusting your gut can come in handy at times, it’s not the case when you’re developing personas. You need to really understand the user and the problem so that you can correctly identify the group of users that your persona will represent. You will use way more than just a persona to make design decisions, but make sure that you have all of your details based on research, and you might just save some cute little armadillo lives in the process.
