We are multifaceted

Put yourself in the shoes of a user for a moment. Imagine that a friend has introduced you to a new Facebook group about a subject you both like. If you are the shy sort, like me, you would lurk around for a little while. Once you became more familiar with the group’s dynamics, you might gradually become bold enough to post a comment or share an appropriate link.

Imagine also, then, that you’ve stumbled upon a blog post on a topic that you care strongly about. Someone has posted a comment that you completely disagree with — I’ll wager that, if you’re fired up, you would post almost immediately, rather than take the time to absorb previous posts. You remain the same person, yet your reaction to something will depend on what it is and what is happening at the time. This is normal.

Acting differently according to circumstance and context is natural. Image source¹.

What does this mean for us as designers? For me, it means that our deliverables right now are probably too prescriptive in their details about who the user is. We would probably do better to work towards a clearer understanding of the user’s varying contexts — contexts that would yield different behaviors and decisions.

In short, our current tools tend to focus on the person, not on predicting their reactions and, therefore, what we should effectively be designing for.

Personas, user journeys, mental models?

Personas, when created properly based on research, distill what we know about a few key user profiles. They have many advantages, particularly in enabling a common language among stakeholders about who our users are. User journeys and experience maps show a potential path that a user can take through an application or website. They are great for understanding flows and for mapping user needs to functionality.

However, both of these tools, and others similarly derived, take on a depth-wise view of the user. User journeys can map out specifically what a user may do, too, but not take into account why they make certain decisions. With personas, you garner some degree of knowledge about users’ background contexts and activities, but they might contain more detail about particular user profiles than what you need to design app-wide features.

Consider what is actually involved in your typical design process. At any stage, your design needs to cater to different activity flows. As designers, we often have to collapse a complex range of user behaviors into quantifiable feature sets that could feasibly fit a product management schedule.

Between personas and user journeys, it would get unwieldy to explore and map these complex ranges of behavior in a way that wouldn’t give us a headache. The closest tool we have at our disposal is the mental model, with which you map out a user’s intentions and tasks. However, a generic use of mental models doesn’t always take different contexts into account at a glance.

The question remains, how can we better position a product or design an interface that maps onto users’ decision patterns when their behaviors and motivations span a spectrum?