Experimenting with non-human personas and UX
Non-human personas represent the lifeforms indirectly impacted by a product’s lifecycle, but how might a solo UX designer use them with little budget or access to experts?
Non-human personas represent the lifeforms impacted by a product’s lifecycle, but how might a solo UX designer use them, with little time or budget for expert involvement, to inform UX decisions to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts of digital products?
Non-humans personas represent invisible humans, lifeforms, and natural environments impacted by a product’s lifecycle. They may represent a real person or a persona group. They may be a combination of fictional representations and scientific data.
Non-human personas can be a specific lifeform directly impacted by a product/business, a complex environment, or a generalised representation of Nature.
Environment stakeholder examples:
- Vegetation (trees, forests, swamps, etc.)
- Water systems (oceans, lakes, rivers, freshwater)
- Air
- Soil
- Climate and weather
- Landforms (mountains, hills, etc.)
- Sunlight
- Sounds
- Temperature
- Gases and atmospheric elements
- Biodiversity
Animal stakeholder examples:
- From large animals (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) to insects and microbes
- On land, sea, air, or underground
- Domestic, livestock, captive, or wild
- Whether ‘proven’ sentient or not
Anthropologist, UX researcher, and environment-centred design advocate, Monika Snzel advises that environment/non-human personas differ from user personas in that they are primarily based on facts.
However, their purpose is the same as a human user persona — to enable designers and decision-makers to empathise with the persona’s needs. They should be written in a way that conveys the non-human as a living, breathing, vulnerable, powerful entity to be heard and respected.
Systems thinking, long-term thinking, and life-centred design
Creating and using personas of non-human stakeholders can help us think systemically about micro-level design (UX, UI, Visual, etc.) and how it might have impacts on non-users, people, animals, and environments along the lifecycle of the product, at the individual, community, and global levels, and over time.
This helps a designer be more life-centred by enabling them to view the impact of their work at micro, meso, and macro levels.
As shared in my earlier article, life-centred design enables product designers and businesses of physical and digital products to consider the impacts of their products on all people, all non-humans, and all planet.
Examples of life-centred design thinking in digital:
- A website designed to keep users clicking through to new pages demands more energy from the website’s servers and its users’ devices, generating more CO2 and contributing to climate change.
- And what happens over time if that website’s user base scales to 10 million? The energy demand increases, the CO2 increases, and the server farms expand destroying surrounding ecosystems and displacing humans and animals — all because the UX was designed to keep users clicking.
- Apps and their UX not only use energy to power the websites and devices but also drives demand for these devices and the mining of the rare earth minerals required to make the devices, which can systemically drive conflict and forced labour in the areas of those mines
Including non-user and non-human personas allows UX designers to see the potential impacts of their design beyond the target user experience, so they may adjust the design accordingly.
Previous research talks about the need for expert input on using non-human information to avoid unintended negative impacts for well-intended design decisions.
However, many UX designers don't get the time or budget to scientifically develop non-human personas and engage experts, effectively cutting them off from this important tool and process that not only informs design decisions but develops designers’ awareness of sustainable digital design.
I wanted to explore the pros and cons of using a non-human persona for a UX project from a solo, low-budget design perspective.
The UX project
The subject to which I applied the non-human persona was an online grocery shopping experience, which used behavioural UX design to nudge grocery shoppers to buy planet-friendly alternatives.
The key UX strategies implemented in this project were 1) proactive product recommendations based on planet-friendly certifications to encourage 2) product swapping.
When users clicked “Add to cart” for their product of choice, they were shown an alternative that was certified to be more planet-friendly (for having sustainable packaging, for example). Users could click “Add this product instead” and seamlessly swap from their first product of choice to the more planet-friendly one and add it to their cart.
You can see the prototype here.
The human user persona
The user persona for this design was Andrew, husband to Amy, and father of a 2-year-old boy. Andrew and his wife worry about the future of the planet but are very price-driven due to the rising cost of living.
The non-human persona
The non-human persona I used represented Nature itself, or more specifically, the interconnected life-inhabited zone from which the supermarket supply chains draw resources (living and non-living) to feed humans and supply them with goods.
Due to the guerilla approach of my personal projects, I based this persona on secondary research of data (web search, articles, etc.), as per Snzel’s recommendation and Tomitch’s validation of this approach.
I wanted this one to be something that when I read it as a designer it would help me empathise with Nature and think as if I am Nature, like a mental preparation/meditation to get into the mindset, so that I may challenge the design from Nature’s needs and give Nature a voice like any business or user stakeholder.
Using the non-human persona
While some practitioners recommend using non-human personas to be used throughout the design process and referred to as often as human user personas, they can also be used retrospectively on existing designs.
My steps to using the non-human persona
- Empathising with non-human/non-user needs and problems—My first step was to read the persona to empathise with Nature as a legitimate stakeholder by focusing on the needs and problems
- Use non-human persona as a lens —I reviewed the design to identify how it directly or indirectly impacted the non-human needs or contributed to its problems
- Bring any insight back to the UX — I then reviewed the insight and the design to brainstorm how the impacts to the non-human could be addressed
Let’s look at the steps in more detail.
1. Empathising with non-human/non-user needs and problems
After reading the persona’s needs as a means of mental preparation, I used an immersion technique by closing my eyes and imagining I was nature, that Nature’s needs were my needs.
I imagined my body as nature, my blood the rivers, my muscles the soil, my skin the land, and my breathing the weather. I imagined humanity as a small lifeform present in my body, a part of my system, but expanding rapidly and overdrawing from my blood and my nutrients, blocking blood and airflow and congesting my veins and lungs.
I read the persona again to consider the problems impacting ‘my’ needs as Nature and what Nature needed now to repair these to get back to thriving:
- Uninterrupted natural cycles of energy and materials (carbon, heat, etc.)
- Time to heal soil, rivers, oceans, air, and biodiversity
And what Nature needed from us to support these changes:
- Use fewer resources
- Use sustainable resources
- Repair, reuse, remake, recycle
- Eat less meat
- Reduce overall consumption
- Reduce and reuse waste
- Regenerate
This was very powerful as I somewhat decentred myself and I critiqued the design with less bias. I still had some bias, of course, but this really spun my perspective to at least what I imagined the non-human’s needs-based perspective would be.
2. Use non-human persona as a lens
I considered these needs as if they were my own, and reviewed each screen design to identify how the design might directly or indirectly impact the needs and/or exasperate the problem.
I imagined, as Nature, I could speak through the blue Earth logo in the design, and I explored what I would say as Nature.
Initial thoughts were ‘buy less, use less, use what you have for longer, grow your own food, reuse or recycle the waste, help me breathe, save my diversity, give my land and waters time to heal.”
All of this spoke to great systemic change and business model revolution, which could feed into business strategy projects connecting to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS).
Just a few examples of which SDGs a supermarket could champion to support the non-human persona of Nature:
- Life on land — agricultural soil regeneration and animal welfare protection for livestock
- Life below water—responsible fishing and fish farming
- Responsible consumption — reduced production and packaging waste
While all three Australian supermarket giants have community commitments that contribute to the SDGS, their businesses are still based on a destructive model of mass production and consumption.
To explore what systemic solutions the business could make, I used The Life-centred Purpose tool to brainstorm problems and solutions.
I first identified and ticked the related SDGs
I then brainstormed the impacts of the business on the related SDGs:
- Livestock welfare
- Supply chain energy use and pollution
- Depletion of fish and sea life
- Farmland health, soil health, pesticides, etc.
- Agriculture’s disruption to natural habitats
- Packaging excess and waste
3. Connecting systemic problems with UX solutions:
To start bringing this back to the UX, I then related these issues to humans, initially at a system level:
- Mass production and overconsumption are worsening all these impacts
Finally, I considered the individual level:
- Individual consumers are disconnected from these impacts
This focused my UX solutioning on improving user sustainability awareness and behaviour.
What were the user’s reasons for this disconnect?
Considering the needs of nature to thrive as defined above, I looked back at my initial user feedback for reasons for this disconnect and for barriers to change.
Users said they:
- Felt time-poor
- Wanted to purchase quickly and easily
- Responded better to incentives or disincentives
The user’s desire for speed and convenience was creating a sense of urgency that made them rush their chores, like grocery shopping, and that made them unable to see and feel the connection with the land from which their food came.
That meant exploring how the UX could use give customers a sense of more time and re-connection with Nature.
So I flipped these problems into How Might We? statements that also related to the identified SDGs.
- How might we make consumers feel less time-poor?
- How might we make consumers feel less rushed?
- How might we use incentives or disincentives to encourage slowing down, connecting to nature, and being more responsible with their consumption?
Again, consideration for the non-human took me back out to a business/systemic view and an approach from outside the purchase journey, but one that might eventually also loop back to influence purchasing behaviours.
For example, supermarkets could give rewards or reward points that can be spent on experiences that help customers:
- Slow down
Passes for massages, meditation, etc. - Connect to nature
Suggested weekly nature walks in the customer’s area - Connect users to where their food comes from
Passes for farm tours, etc. - Reduce the damage
Choose products that are more planet-friendly. And to reduce food wastage, offer passes to cooking classes on how to maximise food use, or provide guides on where to share food when its no longer needed - Heal the damage
To heal the damage of waste products ending up on the land, facilitate litter clean-up days (that also allow participants to earn more points)
How could the UX nurture these user behaviour changes?
- Colour — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Slow down’, the design could use calm colours instead of the usual bright primary colours
- Messaging — Use less time-based/urgency messaging such as ‘Buy now’ or ‘Low stock’
- Persona first-person voice in copy — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Connect to nature’, the UX could also give voice to nature by displaying a pop-up modal on users’ return visits with first-voice messaging ‘from Nature’ thanking them for the planet-friendly choices in their previous shop, and displaying any measurable impact they made (or display a cumulative effect of all planet-friendly shoppers). Also, adding a ‘From Nature’ voice or section in EDMs and other communications with similar information that more deeply connects shopping and product-using habits directly with their connection to land, where their food and goods come from
- Filter local-made products — To ‘Connect users to where their food comes from’, offer a filter function to display locally-made products so users can support local produce
- Links to helpful behaviour-change information — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Reduce the damage’, provide users with awareness and easy purchasing options for more planet-friendly products, and provide behaviour nudges with links to guides to keeping food fresh for longer, and to tips and recipes for switching to plant-based foods
- Promote and integrate not-for-profit and environmental organisations — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Heal the damage’, use visuals and copy to promote community events, such as litter clean-up days, and integrate registration forms for not-for-profit and environmental organisations
Finally, using sustainable digital strategies, I identified several changes I could make to reduce the energy required to power the digital experience, to reduce energy sources required from nature and the carbon output into the atmosphere. For example:
- Ensure images are optimised in size and file size, and convert images to the smaller WebP format
- Replace non-product images (such as promotional images) with svg graphics
- Darken any large areas of light colour (such as backgrounds)
- Reduce font style variations
- Minimise styling in general
Reflections
Specific non-human personas are better but require more accuracy
The Nature persona was so broad, it kept taking me back to the systems level, where the ideation became more about business innovation, where UX designers often have little if any impact.
Using more specific personas might be better for UX designers to innovate at the micro/individual/UX level.
For example, using a ‘Bessy the cow’ persona would generate thoughts at the product level (milk, cheese, etc.) which can then more easily generate ideas at the UX level.
However, the more specific the persona, the more you would need to rely on accurate data and expert advice.
With that in mind, a broad persona such as one for Nature itself is fine for UX designers to start experimenting with and to generate discussion with the wider team.
Use 3 considerations for solutioning
When brainstorming the solutions, UX designers can think in terms of three areas of change:
- Sustainable digital strategies—Reduce the energy required to power the digital experience
- User behaviours for sustainability and ethics—Inform users of sustainable options and nudge them to take those actions
- Systemic/business innovation to put forward to business
As sustainable digital design and behavioural design slowly become more foundational, the real innovation from using non-human personas seems to come from the systemic insights it creates that can then be used as guides or principles for UX to aim to uphold.
Design guides and principles
When innovating at the business/service level, non-human personas can be used to define design guides or principles for life-centred thinking, which can then be used by micro-level designers (UX, UI, visual, copywriters) to sense-check their work and aim to uphold.
More insight to come
More insight to come from these projects experimenting with life-centred design:
- Start practising with 8 steps to using non-human personas in digital design
- Learn more about non-human personas and download templates—Non-human and non-user personas for life-centred design
- Learn how to consider animals more in design–Evolving animal personas as design tools with interspecies design
- Learn about the emerging practice of Life-centred Design
Learn everything about non-human personas with the guidebook and toolkit
More from Damien…
Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:
- Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
- Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design
Get practical with tools and courses:
- Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
- Life-centred Design Courses
- Life-centred Design Innovation Cards
Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.
