Come, come my dear friend! Nice to meet you. What’s your name? Oh, I beg your pardon, I am very impolite. I should have first introduced myself, I am Antipersona and I am here to take advantage of any system that you design and create. You don’t believe me, do you? Wel, let me present to you. I am Antipersona and I am here to misuse your precious product!
“Who are these guys, so called User personas?”
User personas were introduced by a great designer Alan Cooper in his book “ The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity” published in 1998. Although he dedicated only one chapter of his book to the term, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry and marketing due to their potential and benefits. So basically, persona is a hypothetical archetype, a single human character who is created out of the UX research, after discovering major areas of overlap in user behaviors, attitudes, motivations, pain points, and goals. In order to empathize more easily with users, designers (and marketing people) create this fictional characters, giving them real people name, age, pain points, goals, and motivations. But, enough about personas, lets talk a little bit about me. The Antipersona!
“Antipersona?! Does it really exist?”
Oh, yes! Maybe you have never heard of it before, but there are smart people who tried to explain the term Antipersona. The NN Group wrote a good article in which they define the Antipersona, when the business should create one, and how to use it.
They say that an Antipersona is “a representation of a user group that could misuse a product in ways that negatively impact target users and the business.” And I completely agree with their definition.
When creating a new product all people involved in the process are doing their best to create some value, and solve problems (or they should tend to do so). But if someone finds a way to misuse the product, the security and confidence of the regular and loyal users may be threatened, which can lead to many, many other serious problems. Antipersonas help prevent such a situation. So, see? Antipersona is a good guy now!
“Oh, I understand now. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t we always create Antipersonas, for all of our design processes?”
Absolutely no! See, there are a few ways when a user can be harmed by someone’s misuse of the product:
- physical or emotional (injury, or death as the direct result of misusing the product)
- exposure or loose of sensitive information (e.g., fraud, identity theft, harassment, disinformation, illegal content)
If the team finds that someone can cause any of those harms by using the product, there should be one or even more Antipersonas to represent such a risk. But of course, to create even one Antipersona, a research should be organized, someone should organize the data collected from the research and study them in order to create a “real” Antipersona. As you can imagine, this process costs some money and some time, which means basically more money. Above that, not many stakeholders and managers are even familiar with the term. So you should first convince them to invest in creating Antipersona, and I must say, good luck with that!
For all of these reasons, Antipersonas are created when your product can cause big issues to the users if it’s been misused or abused.
“In that case, who is responsible for creating Antipersonas?”
I’m glad you asked! Usually, user researchers and designers (UX or product designers), are responsible for exploring insights from research they conducted, summarizing them and pulling out data that will help create an Atipersona. Also, it’s important that stakeholders and partners are involved in this process. But sometimes the people who can help most are those “on the field”, help desk agents, engineers, developers, HR people etc. The more, the merrier, a wise man once said.
“OK, can you please explain to me what an Antipersona looks like?”
Yes, well, an Antipersona looks pretty much as a regular User Persona:
Identity: You should name your Antipersona with a full name (a surname can be a plus), giving it also age, sex, education and employment status. These are all important information that will help you, and your stakeholders understand the needs and motivations of an Antipersona
Motivations: by this we mean what is the root goal that an Antipersona wants to achieve. They should help us understand which are the actions that an Antipersona will take in order to achieve the goal. And this takes us to the goal!
Goal: you can consider a goal the most important defender when creating an Antipersona. It should describe the action that a person wants to finally do. It’s the action that will potentially harm you, and/or your users.
Tools: and those are the technologies that an Antipersona can use to accomplish its goal.
There are other definitions that should be included when creating an Antipersona, such as: actions, needs, consequences etc. And of course, you can always add a picture just to spice it up a little bit. Or maybe an avatar is more friendly in this situation.
“You talk too much. Can you give me one real life example?”
Sure, here’s one:
“I see… How can I know if I’ve created a “good” Antipersona? Can I validate it somehow?”
Of course! The best way to validate an Antipersona is through user research. But the problem is that you can’t conduct typical user tasting or a common interview in order to confirm if you managed to create a real Antipersona. It’s not like you can recruit some hackers or robbers to see if they can misuse your product. That would be nice, but it’s not legal nor possible.
In some cases (when your Antipersona is children, or elderly people, or people with some kind of disabilities who can be harmed if not used your product properly) you can invite some users in your lab so that you can test your Antipersona.
But in many cases the best thing that you can do is to investigate, read existing literature and resources, consult lawyers, maybe even detectives. If you’re happy, you can interview a professional hacker, just let me know how the hell you found one!
Conclusion
Antipersonas can be a useful tool in UX design as a way of helping designers to think more broadly about the needs and motivations of different types of users. They also help identify potential issues or challenges that may not be immediately apparent when considering only the target audience.
Oftenly, designers and stakeholders ignore the Antipersona, they either forget or decide not to create one in order to save money and time.
But let’s not forget! Antipersonas are the good guys here! They help us anticipate how products can be misused in ways that can harm users and the business. And that is most certainly worth money and time.
