The pros and pitfalls of using visitor personas
If you work in exhibits or visitor experience planning, you’ve probably run into the technique of designing for a fictional family like the Johnsons—two parents, two or three school-age kids, and maybe a picnic lunch packed in a cooler bag. This kind of persona is a stand-in for one of your key audience segments. It’s a technique borrowed from marketing, also seen in digital UX design, and increasingly used in interpretation. And when it’s done well, it can be surprisingly effective.
A visitor persona is a fictional character based on real-world data. It gives you a face and a name for a whole segment of people. Instead of saying “we’re designing for urban families with middle incomes and two or more kids,” you say, “we’re designing for the Johnsons.” They’re a family who visits two or three times a summer, wants their kids to learn something but also have fun, and are balancing their time here with a soccer game, a grocery run, and a stop at Grandma’s.
Personas work because they help us imagine. As planners and creators, we’re not always great at putting ourselves in others’ shoes. But we can picture a family of five. We can think through their day. We can ask, “Would the Johnsons see this trail as too long?” or “Would this gallery feel welcoming to them, or intimidating?” Personas build empathy and improve decision-making. That’s the goal, anyway.
What’s the difference between a segment and a persona?
This part’s important. A segment is a group of real visitors who share characteristics—demographic, behavioural, psychographic, or otherwise. You might know about them from surveys, from Environics’ Prizm segmentation products, from market research, or from your own visitor observations. A persona is a fictional but realistic character created to represent that segment.
A persona brings your data to life. It turns bar graphs into stories. It helps your team picture the people you’re designing for—and keeps you from designing for yourselves.
How do we identify personas?
This is where social science comes in. Personas shouldn’t just emerge from someone’s imagination. Good personas are rooted in:
- Quantitative data, like surveys or segmentation studies
- Qualitative data, like interviews, reviews, or front-line staff insights
- Observations, especially behavioural ones—what people do on site, not just what they say
If you’re using a national segmentation model (Explorer Quotient, say), that’s a solid place to start. But you still need to translate those abstract clusters into vivid humans.
The best personas are co-created. Once you’ve drafted them, run them by your front-line staff. They’ll let you know if the Johnsons actually show up—or if your assumptions are off base. As an interpretive planner, I can usually tell right away if the front-line team is on board—I can hear them use the persona names. “Oh that will totally be a hit with Doug and Laura.” “Ok, but how will that fly with the Mendozas?”
What can go wrong?
Like anything, personas can be misused. The biggest red flag is cultural or ethnic profiling—the idea that all of our visitors with South Asian backgrounds, for example, are the Chandras, when in fact they may fall into several different behavioural segments. It’s one thing to acknowledge cultural preferences when the data supports it; it’s another to assign fixed values to entire communities.
Other risks:
- Overfitting: Designing your whole experience around one persona, as if everyone else doesn’t matter. Most sites work with four to six personas, but that’s not written in stone at all.
- Stale personas: Personas that were built five years ago and never updated
- Bias creep: Personas that reflect the planning team’s values more than the audience’s. I once worked with a group of managers to try to define some personas for their volunteer program—and they came up with characters who were never, ever going to volunteer for them (and probably didn’t even exist IRL).
The good news is that all of these can be managed with decent data, regular review, honest reflection, and a bit of humility.
Make it real—but not too real
Personas are fictional. They are not actual guests. Giving them names, faces, and personalities can be powerful—but it can also mislead. Don’t let your team fall in love with the Johnsons to the exclusion of everyone else. And be careful not to confuse vivid storytelling with statistical rigour.
That said, personas remain one of the most effective tools I know for bringing strategy down to earth. They make abstract segments easier to design for, and they get everyone—from front-line to funders—talking about the same people in the same way.
Just remember: the Johnsons aren’t your whole market. But they’re a handy family to keep in mind when you’re standing in a blank room, trying to figure out where to begin.
Hey does this kind of writing tickle your brain? Sign up for monthly goodness from donenright.com.
Wanna see what past newsletters look like? Clickity click.
Leave a Reply