Personas have long been a staple in the toolkit of experience designers, guiding design decisions and putting potential solutions in the context of the needs of users. They allow designers to know what they are designing and solve real problems for users.

Personas have traditionally been static representations of users, focusing on broad user types like “The Knowledge Worker”. However, as workspaces evolve, a new approach is needed. They often fail to capture the fluid, real-world contexts in which users interact—contexts shaped by an individual’s unique characteristics, changing behavioural states, and personal preferences.

From Fixed Profiles to Dynamic Tooling

Today, we are excited to introduce dynamic personas, which combine a primary persona, capturing different user behaviours, with flexible lens cards to reflect real-world situations.

Lens Card Categories

• Uniquely You: Focuses on enduring traits like neurodiversity, physical mobility and economic status, fundamental to a user’s experience.
• Today I Am: Captures emotional states such as stress or energy levels on any given day, which affect how a user might interact with the same environment differently on how they feel that day.
• Characteristics: Considers working preferences like mobility and team dynamics, shaping user engagement with services around them.

Building Dynamic Personas

Designers can create tailored personas by layering lenses to include situations that affect how a user will interact with a service in a certain context. For example, a Knowledge Worker persona could include:

• Uniquely You: Neurodiverse. Encouraging designers to consider sensory overload in environments and develop systems that mitigate it.
• Today I Am: Stressed. Testing the solution with this lens, designers can explore how someone might interact with the same environment differently depending on how they feel that day.
• Characteristics: Mobile and Remote. Circumstantial factors, e.g. if someone is working remote or onsite, or how much they prefer working alone vs. in teams impact how a user engages with the workplace.

This method ensures designs are reflective of real, diverse user experiences. It allows designers to include these experiences where they might not have had an opportunity to speak with users themselves.

Importance of Dynamic Personas

This approach makes sure our users are present and centre in every design decision, allowing for validation against specific needs rather than broad archetypes. Dynamic personas adapt to the fluidity of real users, enhancing empathy and personalisation in design.

Future Directions

We aim to further refine this dynamic persona system as a tool to enable a deeper understanding of user needs in experience design. Stay tuned for updates on this evolving process!