Teams often use personas while making choices that will affect their users. Personas should represent reality even though they are not “real” people. But what if reality isn’t great? What happens when you find that the variety of current users, as represented by those holding positions of authority in IT, does not match the diversity we would like to see? Do you reflect reality honestly and correctly, or do you present a utopian vision of what life could be like in a more accepting world?

What is a Persona?

Personas are evidence-based representations of a set of research subjects divided into user behavior parts. They are abstractions created to show the range of objectives, situations, and attitudes that influence how customers interact with your product. Personas are usually used by businesses to understand how to make the right decision and how to make the right decision. When you know who your target market is, what their wants are, and how they expect to get those needs met, it is easier to market to them or develop products for them.

Personas are used by product managers, engineers, designers, and other professionals to identify the target audience for their work. You may more accurately identify the wants of the person utilizing your product when you understand their driving forces and frustrations.

How much information is too much?

Getting specific personas makes it easier to visualize who we are creating for. What kind of lifestyle leads our users? What motivations and goals do they have? Understanding the user’s priorities can help us design with them in mind.

As an example, suppose you are creating a website and you are aware that 38% of your audience consists of guardians of young children. Though caring for children may not have an impact on whether a customer uses your product, it does have an impact on how they use it. For example, if they are holding a sleeping child in the other hand, they could only have one hand available. Therefore, the website should be simple for the user to navigate with just one hand. Users could have the ability to choose from a dropdown menu in place of having to input their responses.

Even though having a descriptive understanding of your audience is essential, being overly descriptive can conceal key details. When creating business software, why does it matter whether the user enjoys playing pickleball in their spare time? Personas should be populated with important goal-driven data, free of bias, such as behavioral drivers, product domain, and use case, to help improve the product for the user.

The Debate

How do personas contribute to accomplishing Red Hat’s objective to be inclusive and support diversity? Do we design personas based on the varied population we want to serve, or do we create personas that reflect our current users?

Representational personas’ argument

We must face the identity of our audience. Without taking demographics into account, how can we push for the creation of a more welcoming environment?

GitHub surveyed 6,000 open source users and engineers in 2017. They discovered by choosing responders at random that:

• There were 95% men, 3% women, and 1% non-binary people.
• At the time of the poll, 16% of people identified as belonging to an ethnic or national minority in their home country.
• 7% of respondents said they were asexual, bisexual, lesbian, homosexual, or of another minority sexual orientation.
• Stereotyping (12% vs. 2%), unwanted sexual advances (6% vs. 3%), and language or content that makes them feel uncomfortable were all more common for women than for men.
• Nearly 25% of the open source community could not read or write English “very well.”

We are ignoring the issue if we don’t discuss and admit our current demographics. You can learn how to build a more inclusive environment by confronting the challenges to inclusion in the open source community. Cisgender men start the conversation on why and what needs to change to make space for others to join by portraying the fact that most open source users and developers are straight.

Using accurate data to develop personas does not avoid the inclusion problem. It is emphasizing the lack of diversity in the technological industry. based on the 2021 U.S. According to a population survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 26.7% of managers of computer and information systems are female. You may investigate why women are less likely to follow STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) career routes by understanding these statistics. Do biases exist that prohibit women from assuming positions of higher responsibilities?

The argument for aspirational personas

All the people you want to account for must be taken into account. How can we expect our products to benefit underrepresented, underinvested, and underserved people if we don’t include them in our personas? Unless our methodology changes, our results won’t change.

Focusing attention on underrepresented groups does not imply that you should ignore the other users. Most of the time, when you create inclusive designs for underrepresented groups, they are already effective for overrepresented groups. Making sure all images contain alternative text, for example, enables users to understand what an image is showing without actually viewing it, increasing accessibility for users with various visual abilities. The alternate text does not affect the experience of people without visual problems.

People from underrepresented gender, age, socioeconomic, cultural, and neurodiverse groups, as well as those utilizing assistive technology, should all be reflected in personas. We change the way we think about design, engineering, business, training, and opportunities when we construct aspirational personas.

Help us connect with the next generation of Red Hat users

Insights from real people are used to construct personas. They assist us in creating goods that anticipate the demands and objectives of actual customers. Red Hat can talk to and obtain feedback from people with many kinds of experiences and backgrounds through research initiatives.

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