Inclusive Personas
What Are Personas?
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas helps designers to understand users' needs, experiences, behaviors and goals.
Personas are commonly used across industries to support design and development, among other purposes.
Microsoft succinctly explains why inclusive personas and Inclusive design are so important in their Inclusive 101 toolkit:
“[it] enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. Designing inclusively doesn’t mean you’re making one thing for all people. You’re designing a diversity of ways for everyone to participate in an experience with a sense of belonging. Understanding why and how people are excluded gives us actionable steps to take towards inclusive design.”
Traditional personas involve components like:
Name
A quote that captures their personality
Demographics (such as age, job, family, location, character)
Personality
Traits like loyal, friendly, etc.
Goals
Frustrations
Brief biography
Motivations
Brands & Influencers
Preferred Channels
Traditional personas can oversimplify a user's experience. If we wish to reflect different identities in the persona, such as a disability or certain lived experience that affects their worldviews, we're pigeonholed into the small demographic section or outlining it all in the biography. Both lead to oversimplification or stereotyping that particular identity.
This is where inclusive personas come in.
Why Inclusive Personas Help Create Equitable Solutions
Take a moment to think about the attributes, traits, and identifiers that we use to describe ourselves - things like race, gender, disabilities, orientation, class status, familial status, age, citizenship, personality, religion, communication styles, hobbies, motivations, the teams you love, etc. Now, just imagine that the majority of those different things that make up the holistic you were ignored and only your disability, race, gender, etc. were used to represent you.
By using inclusive personas, you can avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification or stereotyping of communities by not limiting the holistic nature of a persona’s identifiers to snippets in their biography, traits or quote sections. Instead, we build into the persona sheet multiple areas where these identifiers can be noted and explored, without forcing these identifiers to be the only traits of the persona.
A template of an inclusive persona, with persona name, biography, quote, demographics, goals, frustrations, organization specific items, ability, aptitude, attitude, and accessibility sections.
How to Use the Template
In the Inclusive Persona Template, you’ll notice that most of the components in a traditional persona are still in this persona. However, there are four key areas that are added to inclusive personas are:
Ability: this refers to the user’s ability level and any barriers they may have
Aptitude: this determines how experienced the user is and how comfortable they are using your product or service
Attitude: this explains how your ideal user feels toward your brand and their general attitude about life
Accessibility: this shows the challenges a user might face when accessing your product or service
Additionally, there is a section for your organization’s specific items. This could be your product offerings that they already use. It could be trusted brands. It could be the length of time spent on certain apps. Just like every person is different, every team has different items that they need to consider in their personas. Adapt this template to meet the needs of your team, and the communities that these personas represent. Hold secondary engagement sessions with the groups these personas represent to ensure that it showcases the experience genuinely and holistically, in a non-tokenistic or stereotypical manner. The other thing to remember is that inclusive personas will need to be reviewed regularly and that they represent a snapshot in time. Keeping up to date with best practices and the most current ED&I resources through this Hub will help ensure that your personas remain as inclusive as possible.
Additional Resources