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“Kill your personas”

Counterpoint to yesterday’s post: “Kill your personas: How persona spectrums champion real user needs” by Margaret Price at Microsoft.

A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups. It shows how that motivation can change depending on context. Sometimes, a trait can be permanent, like someone who has been blind since birth. A person recovering from eye surgery might temporarily have limited or no vision. Another person might face this barrier in certain environments, like when dealing with screen glare out in the sun. How would your product adapt to this range of people and circumstances with similar needs?

I can get behind that!

Related, check out Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit. (Though I reeeeeally wish that were a webpage…)

Via Doug Belshaw’s “Temporarily Abled” article on Thought Shrapnel.

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GDS’s Accessibility Personas

If you’re a designer or engineer and have never dug in to accessibility personas or cognitive walkthroughs before, I’d recommend checking out GDS’s accessibility persona homepages and their accompanying blog post about how they use persona profiles to test accessibility. As of right now, their profiles include the following personas:

  • Claudia – a sight impaired screen magnifier user
  • Ashleigh – a severely sight impaired screenreader user
  • Ron – an older user with multiple conditions
  • Chris – a user with rheumatoid arthritis
  • Pawel – an autistic user
  • Simone – a dyslexic user
  • Saleem – a profoundly deaf user

It’s no substitute for testing with real users, but it’s a big step in the right direction if it’s not already a part of your design and engineering process.