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If you don't have the time or budget to do research with real users, you should start developing proto-personas that represent the actual audience your product will be interacting with.

But what are proto-personas? In simple terms, a persona is just a fictional character, and in UX, personas are one of the tools for understanding and empathizing with your target audience.

These fictional characters play for different user types of your product/ service, each representing real users' goals, needs, behaviors, and pain points based on what we know or think we know about the users, their goals, and their beliefs.

Or have there been times when you had to deal with difficult stakeholders in some complex projects?

The wins

“Provisional Personas (proto-personas) are our best guess at understanding who is using (or will be using) our products and why.” — Christopher Daniels, Sr. User Experience Designer at Adobe

Conducting a proto-persona workshop can serve a few goals:

Introduce your team to the concept of personas
Start thinking from a customer-centric point of view
Get them to debate and agree upon value propositions that serve the needs and goals of that audience
Steer, inform and justify design decisions
Help stakeholders to feel more empathetic to users’ needs.

It gives UX designers the information they need to understand users’ intentions and create the ideal experience for these users.

In 2018, American Family Insurance and IDEO, a global design company identified a pressing human need for Americans to improve their living condition and built a program from the ground up to meet its needs. Together they launched Moonrise, a digital platform that matches workers who need extra money with employers who need to fill extra shifts. Read more here

“You are not the user”.

How many times do we jump into designing a solution without placing the users at the forefront of the problem? Too many.

How do we know our hypothesis and assumptions are correct before diving into building the product? We don’t.

I learned the lesson the hard. I co-founded a Web 3 startup in 2021. We ran on assumptions. We shipped fast. Rounds and rounds of internal iterations and finally showed our customers the 4th version, 7 months later, and it completely flopped. We produced a vitamin, not a painkiller.

For whatever reason, we just wanted to build cool things we would use vs being customer-centric (Every product builder suffers from this). The lesson, “YOU ARE NOT THE USERS”.

We raised and burnt $250k. We officially ceased operation in 2022. 😢

Creating a proto-persona workshop

Like most things in UX, creating proto-personas is an iterative process. There are numerous ways to create a proto-persona but we suggest conducting a workshop with your team so that everyone can agree on who our major profiles of your users.

Compile existing data prior to the workshop
Invite 3 to 5 participants that may have knowledge about the customers and users of the product/service.
Present the objectives and agenda to set expectations early for your participants.
Ask questions and gain insights related to (1) demographic and environment (2) behaviors and actions (3) needs and goals
Define the pain points that your user might have and the devices and tools that they use
Brainstorm, brainstorm, and brainstorm
Give your proto-persona a real name so the team can easily refer to them
Don’t forget to summarize the workshop

After the workshop is done, it’s time to create your digital proto-personas. This will help your stakeholders and team digest the information easier. To add empathy for your potential users, give your proto-personas a face — how they look should reflect their demographic.

How proto-personas helped me plan a kickass talk

In 2020, I was asked to speak at UXVN Festival. An online event catering to beginners and junior UX designers. Even though I had my assumptions of what beginners and juniors are interested in, I made sure I did my due diligence.

By brainstorming, researching, and surveying. I built proto-personas and aligned my talk around what the folks ‘wanted’. Even added emojis. This a simple example of how proto-personas can serve as a valuable tool for putting the user first.

Here’s a video of how I planned my first keynote with kickass feedback.

Summary

Creating a proto-persona is a good approach to summarising common traits of your target market. Still, it is very unlikely your customer will perform actions or think exactly like the personas that you built. This is why we recommend you incorporate various different research methods throughout the UX design process to validate your team’s assumptions.

Now that we’ve explored the importance of conducting a proto-persona workshop to help center the users in the design process, you can start rethinking how you do design research.

Want to learn more?

If you're interested in running this play to build better Proto Personas, join designers from 40+ countries using UX Playbook. Get detailed step-by-step guides and templates to supercharge your UX process.

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I hope you found this helpful.

See ya next week

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