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It’s hard to write any article about personas — the design artifact people love to hate — without a string of caveats. But, here I am, writing about personas with no caveats. Let’s do it.

With the Rapid Personas play I’m trying to address a couple of challenges in the design process:

1. Encouraging stakeholders to keep specific user needs top-of-mind during a brainstorming exercise
2. Encouraging stakeholders to let go of their misconceptions about their users

Rapid Personas are not definitive. They’re not comprehensive. Instead, they elevate some interesting aspects of the product’s target audience. As an activity, the Rapid Personas play serves as a prologue to other brainstorming activities. Rapid Personas prime participants in your brainstorming activities to keep user needs top-of-mind as they imagine new ideas and concepts.

In this activity, participants construct one-sentence mad-lib-style personas by selecting a role, a need, and a challenge from a limited list of options. You’ll end up with things like:

I am a hiring manager who has to evaluate candidates for a position but I’m afraid of implicit bias.

I am a small business owner who has to define the requirements for a position but I’m afraid of implicit bias.

I am a recruiter who has to evaluate candidates for a position but I’m not clear on all the technical needs.

Yes, I realize these aren’t complete personas. Don’t @ me.

The activity works because participants have a narrow set of choices for each role, need, and challenge. Even if you only have three choices for each slot, that’s 27 possible combinations. Because the options are limited, they have to read and consider each one.

The key to making this exercise work is that the roles and needs and challenges have to be independent of each other. That is, a need can’t be tied to a specific role and a challenge can’t be tied to a specific need. The way to make this work is to link them to different aspects of the user’s experience.

Example 1: Learning App Rapid Personas

In a brainstorming session for a learning app, I used roles that were related to the person’s reason for learning: naturally curious, studying for an exam, or earning credits. Distinct from the reason, the need represented the scope of what they were learning: to brush up on an old topic, to learn a new topic, or to study a topic assigned to them. Finally, the challenge reflected the typo of pressure they were under, regardless of their reason or objective: they were short on time or they had never used the learning app before. These combinations worked because the options themselves are independent of each other.

Example 2: Tech Marketing Rapid Personas

For a project about marketing a technology product, the Rapid Personas broke down this way:

• Role = position in the organization (team lead, contributor, executive)
• Need = tasks typical for products like this one (all related to managing digital assets)
• Challenge = problem typically associated with legacy solutions (e.g. security, decentralization, etc.)

The technology product we were dealing with addresses people’s needs throughout the organization. People in different positions might deal with different kinds of digital assets, but they all have a need to do so.

🔬 Sourcing Roles, Needs, and Challenges

For me, this play works best after I’ve done some user research. Everyone carries assumptions into the design process, and user research can shake those up. Research has helped me:

• Reframe roles based on how users refer to themselves, not how stakeholders refer to them
• Highlight high-priority needs
• Reveal challenges not previously acknowledged

As you describe each role, need, and challenge, providing some rationale for why you chose these can make or break the play. One way participants might undermine the exercise is to call into question the validity of the options. By responding with observations from user interviews, you can re-direct the conversation to where these differing views come from.

📈 Post-Activity Analysis

Remember: this activity won’t tell you anything about your users. It does tell you a lot about the people working on your project. Look at the roles, needs, and challenges they avoided to find out where they feel a lack of confidence. Look at the roles, needs, or challenges most selected to find out where they feel overconfident. Watch how they integrate these rapid personas into the rest of the workshop: do they ignore them? reinterpret them?

Clarifying for yourself and your team where the preconceptions and misconceptions are, and how deep they go, can help prioritize your research and discovery activities. It can also help you shape the narrative of your design efforts.

💬 How’d It Go?

If you try the Rapid Personas play in a workshop, let me know how it goes. Comment here or hit me up on Twitter @brownorama.