Dioramas — XR personas
Meet Ellen
Ellen is 82, lives in Madison WI although she was raised in Chicago. She’s spunky: “Any day I wake up is a good day,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.
She’s a retired admin — though she’d tell you “we were called ‘secretaries back then…” and volunteers with local veterans groups. She’s challenged with macular degeneration and glaucoma, and manages her conditions with a medication regime and by running roughshod over a team of medical specialists. She’s admittedly not very tech savvy, but she’s managed to learn email and to control her smart TV. She does not at all care for the “damn un-smart phone” her daughter gave her.
Also, it should be noted that Ellen doesn’t really exist.
Or rather, she exists only as a UX persona — a fictional person that represents a group of users relevant to a particular business/design need. I developed the (rather robust) Ellen persona while doing user research at my current day job, a pharmacy benefits management company that among other things produces digital experiences for people like Ellen.
In my work I prefer to talk directly to people I design for. I prefer to do contextual inquiries, site visits, and develop an understanding. In my own experience nothing gives better insights than immersing in the context of a person or group and being able to get a sense of how they are and the way they live and work and might feel about the thing I’m working on. But I don’t always get to talk to real users; it can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. So lots of times I consult our relevant personas, holding images and ideas about real users in my head as I do UX work.
It’s not the same thing as visiting with people, of course. I lose out on a lot of insight and detail, going from being able to sit and talk to having to consult a document describing a fictitious person representing that group. But consulting this doc is definitely better than doing no research at all, or just using my own experiences and frame of reference as a guide.
Personas can be a great tool for design work, informing strategy, and getting crisp on requirements. I can invoke them during design efforts: “but what would Ellen think about this?” And hopefully make better decisions. Persona docs can be pretty detailed, rigorously informed by a great deal of research, updated over time. They usually contain a picture, if only to help increase the connection and reinforce the idea she represents real users.
XR and the coming, er, realities
With the evolving tech supporting extended reality (XR), soon it’s going to be very trivial to visualize people and spaces that exist only as digital renderings.
Right now I can put on an Oculus (okay, Meta) Quest 2 headset and seemingly teleport to my default virtual “home,” a lavish desert hideaway I assure you looks very different from where I live in real life. Even though I’m standing in my own living room while I’m experiencing this virtual reality (VR) environment, I can peer over my digital balcony and see waterfalls and hot air balloons in the distance. I feel very present, immersed, and embodied. It’s thrilling, even though I’m used to it. With the related technology of augmented reality (AR) and the proper headgear I could walk around my real living room and peer out my real window and see that same digital waterfall and hot air balloon painted onto the reality of the street outside my own house.
Such is part of the magic and promise of XR technology. I think there’s a great deal of application for such tech in our UX work; a particularly intriguing example is what I call the diorama, the XR version of a UX persona.
When I was a kid, a diorama was something I built as a school project. For example, if we were studying dinosaurs I’d visualize a scene with a dinosaur that told a story or pointed something specific out, like maybe how brontosaurus ate from tall trees, and then I’d find an empty shoe box (or acquire one by dumping a pair of mom’s shoes out and claiming the box) and set to work building my diorama. I’d get a plastic molded apatosaurus I’d scored on a field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago, use some of my dad’s model railroad terrain and some construction paper and pretty soon I’d have a serviceable diorama to show off in Science class.
“Behold the Apatosaurus, eating tasty eucalyptus leaves!”
I think we could use XR technology with the idea of a persona and create dioramas, something much more useful than the flat docs we work with now.
Dioramas — XR personas
Imagine instead of just a descriptive document and a picture of Ellen, I had a high-fidelity avatar of her, as well as a representation of her living room, kitchen, or workspace at the local veteran’s commission office. With my VR or AR glasses I could put myself right there with Ellen in her living room, watch how she takes her meds, fumbles with her smartphone trying to track her medication refill order, and see how she makes adaptations to her environment to make her day better. Instead of all this being in my mind’s eye as I read through her persona doc, or describing it to stakeholders as we break down a particular design requirement, I can all actually experience seeing Ellen and struggling with the thing we’re talking about, see and more fully the adaptations she makes. We can actually experience together, as we discuss requirements.
There is an incredible power in XR technology, conveyed in the form of presence, immersion, and embodiment. When we feel present in an environment like Ellen’s living room, we get much more of a sense of her than just hearing her description. When we’re immersed in a moment of her life, like listening to her explain how she’s added raised dots to the TV remote so she can better navigate through channels, we become much more mindful of how she might struggle with a complex design for ordering medication refills. When we’re embodied and can open virtual doors and sort through virtual items or nod as Ellen describes her day to us, we come away much better informed and empathic.
Which probably helps us design better.
When I was a very green UX architect back in the mid-aughts, I was invited with other UX team members to see what the Whittman Hart agency in downtown Chicago had done for their client, the tool folks at Craftsman. With a lavishness and detail I’d never experienced as a UX practitioner, I walked through sets the agency had built, imaginings of individual “rooms” for different personas they’d put together representing workshops that these fictitious folks tinkered in, did their DIY projects in. I was dumbstruck by the level of detail the agency had gone to — and fascinated by the idea that so much money could be spent in this way. And as it turns out almost 20 years later, probably at least in part inspired by this as I consider how XR might change or extend the work I do as a UX professional.
So, instead of just the document we have today, what if we crafted a high-fidelity avatar of Ellen (using something like Unreal’s Metahuman Creator technology)? We could actually see that twinkle in her eye, see how she moved around her space, and hear what she had to say.
What if we built out Ellen’s environment based on the same info we gathered during our visits and interviews? Her living room, her medicine cabinet, her kitchen, her front door, all these little bits she interacts with. We could develop flows and vignettes like cut-scenes from a video game that allow us to see Ellen as she goes about her day and meets her various challenges — present, immersed, and embodied.
I’m not talking about holodeck-level interaction (although how cool and useful would that be?) but just a well done avatar, spaces, and some scripted routines that let us through the capabilities of XR tech develop a much more weighted awareness of Ellen and the users she represents. All from the comfort of a cleared-out conference room, or my home office. I feel being able to drop into a suite of these dioramas while doing design work would be immensely valuable to me.
Doing it with a group of stakeholders might allow us all to literally experience and more fully understand who we’re serving with the work we’re doing.
I’m a UX designer and researcher with over 20 years of total experience in the areas of e-commerce, healthcare, insurance, big data, retail, online identity, and community. I’m speaking for myself, not as a representative of any organization. Any imagery used in the public domain, is correctly attributed, or I own a license to display.
I loved dinosaurs as a kid, but even more I loved collecting the Mold-o-rama models from the various places my grammar school would bring us on our field trips.
