Reviving personas – personas are dead!

Background

Men in prison interact with a series of services daily. For example, they order their food, get in touch with loved ones and sign up for a course.

In the UK Ministry of Justice, we observed a phenomenon in digital teams: they were each creating their own personas even though they were all designing for the user group. Not only that but these personas were reinforcing stereotypes and creeping in biases.

Task
Staff do not often meet prisoners to break some of the assumptions we all have about people in custody – so we needed to do that for them. We could not have bad personas and be ok with that. It was time for this problem to be addressed in the research and design community.

I joined a small team of researchers to identify patterns of behaviour, attitude, and values on men in prison to encourage a less biases view of our users. We did this as part of our dedicated time for learning and development.

My role and approach

I started soon after the researchers had agreed and drafted a research plan. Initially, my contribution would be on designing any artefacts needed for the project. However, I soon became more involved in the analysis. Throughout the project:

• I transcribed interviews and supported researchers on coding transcripts using Dovetail

• I worked with the team to draft and iterate a codebook

• I affinity sorted insights and visually organised them so the team could draw conclusions

• I led the creative direction of the project, including the test of different visual languages  

• I designed the persona cards and any other artefacts such as quote cards, a website about the project and an insights library

Result

Five personas have emerged from quantitative analysis. We knew there was a risk that not a single persona would be uncovered from the data we collected. And that was ok. We led the data guide us.