Complex Speech Bubble Persona

The way personas were made has frustrated me for quite some time. To me it seemed they didn’t give enough insight into the persona’s life. Some of them looked like long essays, others looked like CIA database profiles. Simply put I wasn’t happy the way personas were made. I thought there had to be a better way.

The most common personas I came across looked like these:

Concerns

• Clients may not feel enough empathy
• Clients may not want to read the whole text
• Telling a story in a way of displaying data may look like a dry database

Searching for a better way

So I started searching for a better solution. Actually, I came across a couple of nice concepts. One of them I found on UXMag.com. It was very detailed but somewhat too detailed. However, I liked the very real persona picture and the persona summary ie “Learning focused teacher”. Another great concept worth mentioning is Jason Travis’s persona. You can see his set on flickr. I was  fascinated to see how much handbag items can say about a person. So I thought it was a really good shot, however, I missed the text, context and scenarios.

Speech bubbles – the idea

Since I’ve used speech bubbles for my sitemaps and user flows I thought I should go ahead and use the concept for personas, too. Since I started to study the difference between left brain and right brain thinking, it felt right to create a persona that displays the split thinking between the 2 brains. This is what I came up with and I called it the “Left brain – Right brain Persona”:

This was great, however, I felt it’s too empty and there are so many more things I can add to it. I thought about it and came up with an idea. The questions of a person can tell a lot about the personality.  As the above concept focused mainly on distinguishing the left brain and right brain and not on creating empathy, I though I’ll drop the concept and add more important questions to the speech bubbles. So my next version I called the “Questioning Persona” and it looked like this:

I knew I’m onto something and I wanted to keep the questions as I felt they create empathy and gave good insight into the person’s thoughts. However, I felt that I still can add much more to it. I went on and tried out a couple of more ideas. Next up, the “Interview Persona”.

I felt this was quite artificial and such an interview could never really occur. But I liked the idea of replying to a question… So this lead to the next idea. In order to make the discussion more real I introduced a colleague and created a conversation between my persona and the colleague. I called it the “Overheard Discussion Persona”.

This was quite good I thought. Even my wife told me she can feel empathy and that everyone likes to overhear people talking about interesting things. So I knew I’m onto something and I want to use this concept. Next, I thought that the speech bubbles are nice but it would be good though if I was able to show a couple of things in a less abstract way. So I added titles like “worldview”, “motivation”, “demotivation”, “looking for”, “not looking for” to my speech bubbles. I called it the “Think Bubble Persona” or “Worldview Persona”.

I really liked this one. It was very appealing to me visually. I felt, however, that I should settle with the overheard persona instead as it looked and sounded very real. So I added some life pieces to my overheard persona as per the idea of Jason Travis. However, I thought these life pieces should not be limited to what a person has in their handbag but what they listen to, what is their dream holiday, what they read, what pets they have etc. So I came up with this one.

Then I created a full “Life-Pieces Persona” just for the record.

I thought I have enough concepts by now and I should maybe really try to combine them in order to create my final persona. It wasn’t easy because there were too many speech bubbles and the first couple of attempts looked a little bit unorganised and overcrowded. You can see one of my attempts below.

But then I moved things around and I came up with this final concept and this one I really liked. And this I called the “Complex Speech Bubble Persona”. It was a really long exercise but I think the final product was worth it. Use the concept if you like and share it with others. You can view the demo here.

Step by step process

First, source your persona photo. This is very important because by doing so you will create empathy for yourself towards your persona. In my experience, starting from the text will not inspire you enough to create enough empathy for building your persona. A good source to look for non copyrighted photos is flickr. Just set the advanced search filter to “Find content to use commercially” and “Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon”. Then source your life pieces: music, clothes, car, house, family phone etc. Try to tell a story about your persona. Then create the speech bubbles from a round rectangle and a triangle behind it. Now, you are ready to write the content. The speech bubbles on the top are the thoughts of your persona about certain topics such as “looking for”, “not looking for” etc. The bubbles on the left make up the conversation with a colleague, friend, boss, customer – whatever your persona’s usual environment requires. The bubbles on the right are questions your persona may ask when visiting your website, using your product etc. That’s it. I hope you like it, it’s not as hard to create it as it looks like. In fact you can use and modify this concept as you like. You can also download the axure source file to get started.

Benefits

The Complex Speech Bubble Persona is a great way to create empathy for your users. Both you and your clients will be able to visualise various aspects of your users, their worldviews, their questions, their talking style and their life pieces. All these can create a very complex picture of your persona which can then result in a better user experience.