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I felt this to my core. The real MVPs.

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so apparently now people work second shifts....

Hi everyone!
I'm Staci, a Senior Graphic Designer // Brand Designer and I'm looking to land a FT remote role asap. I've been applying to Disney Streaming Services and Amazon and Pinterest would love a referral if anyone would like to help. I'd gladly share my resume and folio link via DM!
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St. John & Partners is searching for full time
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Personally I prefer archetypes over personas.
Personas - a fictional character used to define a group of users.
Archetype - an abstract label that represents a group of users.
Both represent similar information, but a persona has a “person” attached to the information presented. For example:
There is a user who loves social media and is driven by increased engagement.
Persona: Stacy, 24, lives in the city is eager to create content bc … but her pain points are…
Archetype: the influencer is eager to create content, but some pain points for this user type are…
I personally don’t like creating a fictional character because you get hyper focused on that specific character rather than user group
Same on preferring archetypes to personas in most cases (sometimes i do prefer a persona). I’ve found that when using personas people become hung up on the demographics - gender/age and make assumptions that are not represented at all in the persona. Ive been able to avoid these by utilizing archetypes and removing that noise to focus on needs and behaviors
Subject Expert
Interestingly, I'd recommend archetype for strategy and persona for ux design.
Archetypes, by definition, are generalized subset of the population with common tendencies. Pros: by the time it's an archetype, it would have to include a significant subset of the population. So your strategy would address a significant percent of PMS.
However, when it comes to UX, you want to get into the nuanced. When you dive deeper into your offering vs the landscape and competitors. You may find that your common users have different nuances that differentiate them from consumers who go to your competitors. Or, your brand may be perceived slightly differently than your competitors and you have relatively nuanced brand promise that your need to fulfill. Personas allow you to dive deeper into specific needs or behavioral tendencies that are more actionable in user flows. And you may even have more than one Personas within an architype.
So to me, archetypes address than 30 thousand feet, but Personas address the 50 feet.
Obviously, (as you can tell), I'm in a world where there are different needs for both. Not the case for every product or business types.
I recently did an engagement for a client where we kind of did both. We did the background research on users and grouped them by demographics but then we also cross referenced them to single-interest groups. (Gardening, historic renovation, exploring, antiques) Because interests are easier to target in social media. Based on this, I think I lean more toward archetype than persona. My feeling is that the strict persona exercise is becoming less and less useful. It made sense when advertising was more of a demo-targeted tactic.
I often feel personas can sway too far into demographics, which can be misleading particularly in businesses where there is low design maturity. I’ve seen this in organisations where employees from other areas will take the personas and use them thinking the user group MUST have x,y,x demographic information to be true (particularly getting way to tied to age etc.) . Archetypes are more based on universal behaviours regardless of demographics. For example two people may be very similar in demographic information, things they like etc. but have very behaviours and needs.
OP, I feel like we need this on a slide.
We use archetypes for institutions and personas for people (service design)
Great question. How do you define each?
Interesting thoughts out here! I’m curious to know how is “profile” different from “archetypes”? If persona is derived from archetype, the same used to be the case for persona being derived from a profile…
Subject Expert
Thank you. And not all user research are the same. If you send a strategist, a marketer, and a ux designer to conduct "user research", you'd yield pretty different results.
This article rings true to me. And I will incorporate this in my future thinking:
https://www.method.com/insights/how-to-use-personas-and-archetypes-to-drive-shared-understanding-and-digital-strategy/
Archetypes are more psychologically driven. You get into motivation, intention, and drives. But they are not empathic. Personas are based on empathy thus get more into specific behaviors and sentiments.
To me this may fit into my model above. But I'll work with them in the future with a different lens.
Both are often useless, because 90% of researchers create them incorrectly. They fill in the blanks with biased assumptions, based on a solution they already thought of. Or, they fill in the blanks with too much irrelevant, useless info that points to no insight.
A correctly-made persona is supposed to work exactly the same as an archetype. A good persona IS an archetype. The original purpose for a persona over an archetype was so that a UXer or stakeholder could imagine the user in an clearer way, because UXers and stakeholders had trouble empathizing with an amorphous archetype. It was simply easier to imagine the archetype as “Jane.”
But the problem with “Jane” was that researchers got carried away and played dress-up, tediously itemizing “Jane’s” hobbies and habits, wholly forgetting that Jane the *persona* was just a name attached to an *archetype* that’s supposed to help us build a better product. It’s not supposed to be “Jane’s” dossier or online dating profile.
UX researchers are often PhD’s in psychology. But many don’t know that the purpose of personas/archetypes are to find actionable insights to discover product or feature utility. Too many UX researchers have no training whatsoever in applied UX strategy for *products.*
UX = behaviours, motivations, needs and pain points over demographics and the audience segmentation you’d typically see in media personas/profiles