Humanizing the User with Physical Artifacts
Personas are researched and vetted fictional-representations of users, designed to capture their goals, motivations, frustrations, and behaviors. Personas help teams develop empathy, make informed design decisions, and keep the user’s needs at the center of the product development process. While traditional persona documents are often detailed and robust, they typically live in a folder or a slide deck and are initially consulted, then forgotten. To prevent this from happening with my development teams, I started using baseball card personas.
Persona Used by Lantern Product Design
Baseball Card Personas
I started using baseball card-style personas as a physical, concise supplement to traditional persona documentation. The goal was to distill the essence of the persona into a visually striking, instantly scannable artifact that team members could literally keep on their desks.
These cards:
- Reinforce empathy throughout the lifecycle of the project
- Provide quick recall of the user’s mindset and challenges
- Encourage ongoing, informal conversation about the user’s needs
- Bring a bit of fun and personality into an otherwise dry documentation format
- Reinforce empathy throughout the lifecycle of the project
- Provide quick recall of the user’s mindset and challenges
- Encourage ongoing, informal conversation about the user’s needs
- Bring a bit of fun and personality into an otherwise dry documentation format
Example Baseball Card Persona Front and Back
Impact
The persona cards quickly became a favorite amongst development teams because of their engaging nature and quick referenceability as a physical artifact that could be kept within team members' workspaces. Most importantly, they kept the user’s voice present in day-to-day decisions, without requiring anyone to open a PDF or locate the persona documentation on team's sites.
In Situ Baseball Card Person
