A persona in user-centered design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product similarly. In a design thinking workshop, usually, we encourage our workshop participants to empathize with the user represented by a persona.

In this article, I will share three concepts:

Introducing ‘empathy’ to my participants

I have been educated to emphasized with my users since the first day on my journey of design thinking. Until one day, in my counselor training class, I saw this video by Dr. Brené Brown. The video made me start reviewing the value of ‘empathy’ in my design thinking workshop.

Empathy could help the creator in anticipating the reaction of the social environment to one’s creative product and adjust its features to “the right amount of originality.”

This ability is critical when creative activity focuses on the works which need to be accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying by a group. In which case, the design thinking workshops are dealing most of the time. Helping the workshop participants to ‘connect’ with the users is the initial, and one of the most critical tasks a workshop facilitator needs to do.
Ask yourself a question that would you be able to feel the connection with your users in the workshop? You are in this colorful room, listening to the relaxing background music and looking at your persona, who is smiling at you from the center of a piece of paper. What you could probably do is scribbling on a post-it: ‘Angry’ and stick it right next to your persona. But you might never know what your user feels.
One of the ways I would suggest building the connection is by guiding your participants through a scenario. Use the tangible message to facilitate imagination. Invite your participants to perform some tasks using the tool which you are trying to redesign. Or turn off the fancy background music for a while, ask your participants to close their eyes, and simulate the scene the user is facing in their mind.

Why is the connection important to creativity?

Complexity vs .relevancy

Before writing this article, I did a small scale survey for my research. I chose 16 popular questions on Quora and asked 42 people to rate the complexity and relevancy of each item, using a scale of 5. Despite the small sample size, we can still see the trend of decrement of issue complexity when people feel more related to the topics.

Episodic memory

Episodic memory is a person’s unique memory of a specific event; it will be different from someone else’s recollection of the same experience. Recent research has presented evidence for a multifaceted contribution of episodic-data use to design. In problem-solving activities, one may use their encounter or exploiting others’ experiences as a direct solution or reference for solution evaluation. In other words, the better our participants being connected to the users, the better they convert their experiences into original ideas.

Empathizing with others by imaging a persona could make people search for other ideas than for a neutral problem statement. For example, encouraging people to picture a stressed-out worker could release their memories of friends or of themselves in the same circumstance. Remembering others’ or own similar encounters could improve cognitive aspects such as retrieval fluency. This cognitive enhancement could establish a positive effect of empathy on creativity.

Bringing persona into your workshop

It is not as straight forward as it appeared to be. I have tried several times, bringing several well-defined personas to my seminars and encouraged my participants to build on top of them. I found my participants having issues relating themselves to the represented user groups. This could be caused by the high-fidelity of the persona, and the lack of commonalities between workshop participants and the persona we bring in.

I would suggest to hand the ownership of the persona over to your participants. If you have sufficient time in your workshop, you may group your participants by their knowledge of the users. Grouping the participants with a similar interpretation of user background would ensure the consistency of episodic memory retrieval.

If you decide to give a grouping before the workshop and bring the persona you created in previous user research. You may ask the participants to relate the character to one of their closed friends who share the same attributes the proposed persona has. Also, keep the fidelity of the given persona to a minimum necessary level. Doing so, you could shape the direction of creativity, as well as reserve the cognitive efforts of your participants for problem-solving.

References

Form, Sven & Kaernbach, Christian. (2018). More Is Not Always Better: The Differentiated Influence of Empathy on Different Magnitudes of Creativity. Europe’s Journal of Psychology. 14. 54–65. 10.5964/ejop.v14i1.1432.

Willemien Visser. Use of episodic knowledge and information in design problem-solving. Design Studies, Elsevier, 1995, Analysing Design Activity, 16 (2), pp.171–187. ff10.1016/0142–694X(94)00008- 2ff Inria-00633727

Chaehan So & Jaewoo Joo (2017) Does a Persona Improve Creativity?, The Design Journal, 20:4, 459–475, DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2017.1319672