Using Ai to Create Better User Personas

I use Ai to assist me with the creation of user personas for both real-world and conceptual Ai projects. I don't create them with the expectation that I'm going to pull a fully baked user persona out the Ai oven (and neither should you!), but Ai can help us create better user personas than ever before.

How?

Because Ai provides us with unprecedented storytelling tools that did not exist before. Using Ai to help you build user personas allows you to create diverse persona demographics, detailed persona stories, visual imagery with character consistency, and video to provide even more context for your user story.

In effect, using Ai to help you create a user persona empowers you to be a script writer, an author, a creative director, and a video producer! Not bad.

I like my personas to feel real and authentic. I've got enough material to write about this for hours, but I care about your mental wellbeing, so let's just look at 9 quick tips, tricks, and techniques that can help you build better user personas in a shorter amount of time.

1. Make Diversity Mandatory

I often see people getting all bent about Ai being biased and exclusive, etc etc etc. Oh, really? And why is that? Maybe because Ai is simply a reflection of humanity? We make it into a technological scapegoat that absolves us of responsibility.

But what can you do as an individual designer do to make Ai more diverse & inclusive?

Easy peasy. First, create a simple set of instructions that make it mandatory for Chat to create diverse and inclusive personas whenever it does so. This could be as simple as a single sentence. Then plop those instructions into any of your design GPTs or you can add it to Memory, too.

And guess what? ChatGPT follows these rules very well! Sometimes to the point that the user personas get a bit too exotic to be realistic for your user personas. ??

2. Develop Conversational Personalities

Having Chat create detailed conversational personalities for your Ai user personas is another simple way to "add more life" to the personas. It also helps to provide more nuanced and authentic answers that sound less robotic and canned. This is a good place to use a role-playing prompt technique wherein you are asking Chat to play a creative writer when creating its response.

Pro-Tip: For our "Conversational Personality" entry we want detailed, descriptive responses with a minimum number of words and paragraphs. Not as easy as it sounds. Chat's algorithms force it be conversational. It does not like writing long text entries so make sure to feed it clear instructions with word and paragraph minimums.

3. Engineering Speech Pattern Instructions

Here's another set of ChatGPT instructions, this time with the intention of making Ai role-playing persona interviews more realistic by having the Ai take into consideration different factors that could affect speech patterns of the user person as it answers questions.

Admittedly, this is somewhat of a passion project exploration for me and a work in progress. Sometimes I get good results, sometimes I need to do some cajoling and the results are not 100% consistent:

Pre-Engineered Speech Pattern Prompt/Instructions Example

"When asked to perform role-playing interviews, always follow these rules:

1. Before beginning role-playing interviews, list the “factors affecting speech patterns” listed below that you are applying to the User Persona and the reasons why.

2. Format the role-playing interview in the form of an interview transcript that is typical of an ethnographic interview. For instance, always note who is speaking and put the questions and responses in quotation marks.

3. When role-playing a user persona, always make the tone of voice of informal.

4. Always apply an appropriate amount of natural language conversation fillers (i.e., fillers like “well”, “um”, etc.), pauses, and occasional incorrect grammar to make the responses more reflective of a real-life transcript of an interview. In your responses as the user persona, consider how the following speech patterns you apply to the user persona will affect the amount of natural language conversation fillers you use for that user persona’s replies.

5. When role-playing any User Persona, always consider the following factors affecting speech patterns:

A. Background and Education

- Level of Education: More complex vocabulary and structured sentences for highly educated individuals.

- Cultural Background: Use of idioms, slang, and specific language constructs.

- Profession: Jargon and communication styles specific to different professions (e.g., tech professionals vs. creatives).

B. Personality Traits

- Introverted vs. Extroverted: Extroverts may speak more openly and at length, while introverts may provide more concise answers.

- Confidence Levels: Confident individuals tend to have a more assertive and clear speech pattern, while less confident ones might have more hesitations.

C. Context and Environment - Formal vs. Informal Settings: Speech patterns change based on the formality of the situation.

- Physical Environment: Background noise or distractions can lead to more pauses and repetitions.

D. Health and Well-being

- Physical Health: Illness or discomfort can impact speech clarity and energy levels.

- Mental Health: Conditions like depression or anxiety can affect speech patterns.

E. Linguistic and Regional Influences

- Accents and Dialects: Regional accents and dialects influence pronunciation and vocabulary.

- First Language Influence: Non-native speakers might have distinct speech patterns influenced by their first language.”

Always apply these speech pattern characteristics to your role-playing responses."

Pro-Tip: Set your instructions so that Chat has to analyze the demographics of the user persona and then explain what factors it would apply to the responses of the user persona. This is helps give you insight into how well your instructions are being followed and gives you a chance to vet Chat's intentions before lighting the candle.

4. Ai Interviews

You can use Chat to develop a quick interview script for you interviews based upon the information found in your research to date.

In the prompt to kickoff your Ai interview, place the user persona's basic demographics, their conversational personality, and the speech pattern rules. Then have Chat conduct the interview, role-playing both the interviewer and the interviewee.

5. Create "Day in the Life" Stories

You can pre-engineer prompts for Chat to create detailed "Day in the Life" stories for your user personas. You can use them as "one-off" prompt + response entries or place them within method-chain GPTs. Having Chat play the role of a creative writer within the instructions helps to provide more detail and authenticity to the story.

We want a well-written, descriptive Day in the Life story that is at least 700 words or so long. Just like developing Conversational Personalities, you will need to be mindful when you engineer and fine-tune your "Day in the Life" prompt because of Chat's default conversational guidelines. So if your creative writer is giving you executive summaries, you'll want to add in things like word limits and even provide a specific number of paragraphs and generically describe the info that should be in each paragraph.

Now take that story and stick it in your back pocket. You're gonna need it later. ??

6. Turning ChatGPT Persona Info into Midjourney Prompts

When we talk about creating Ai tool chains, ChatGPT or another LLM is often the linchpin of the chain. While most Ai tools eat similar prompt food, they all like slightly different recipes to be at their best. LLMs work great as Ai tool translators. You can give it information you have generated to your taste - like, say, a Day in the Life story - and have it translated into prompts that are perfectly structured for a different Ai tool - like, say, Midjourney (extraneous foreshadowing ??).

So, let's have Chat create some Midjourney prompts for our user persona images. ChatGPT has a pretty good handle on what makes a good Midjourney prompt without having to overly direct it at this point. But it still doesn't hurt to give it some reminders. ??

Note that in the above example the differences in the structures for Prompt 1 versus 2, 3, and 4. Prompt 1 is to be utilized to create our user persona "hero" image while 2, 3, and 4 are prompts that will create imagery for our "Day in the Life" story.

7. Using ChatGPT-generated Midjourney Prompt to Create a User Persona "Hero" Image

Ok, we've got some ChatGPT-generated Midjourney prompts! As we think ahead to building out the story for our user persona, we'll want to create multiple images of the same character in different scenes.

We'll start that process by generating a "hero" image of our user persona. We'll have ChatGPT create a Midjourney prompt to build that image utilizing the basic demographic info and a smidge of our "Day in the Life" info.

What we want for our hero image is a clear, crisp frontal portrait of our user persona that matches their demographics. For more authentic user persona images use descriptors like "candid" or "everyday person" or "raw character". You can even engineer the Chat instructions to do this automatically when creating prompts for hero images.

8. Create Your Midjourney "Day in the Life" Imagery

Now that we have a "hero" image of our user persona, we can use Chat to create multiple unique scenes for our user persona. When we had Chat create our detailed "Day in the Life" story, we developed all the information Midjourney needs to create user persona imagery: subject, pose, activity, environment, time of day, lighting, props, etc.

We can use Chat to mine the Day in the Life for the subject matter to create a batch of new prompts that represent the life of our persona. And because we've already generated our user persona's "hero" image, we can use that as our character reference (--cref) image in Midjourney to maintain character consistency.

9. Enhancing Your Persona with Context

Using the Chat demographic and the lifestyle information and imagery you have developed about the user persona with ChatGPT and Midjourney, you can begin to build out your story even more by creating imagery that brings in the product or services you have conceived of and even place them within the context of the user persona's life.

In this example, we have used Tina's research to create a visual brand language and cycling jersey that derives from the Ai-assisted user persona we developed for Tina.

So now we have an image of Tina with character consistency applied, in a scene based upon her demographics (lives in SF = cycling on Highway 1), being imagined in a cycling jersey concept that we have designed based upon her stated tastes and product desires. Our user persona story has now moved into a concept of what the future could look like.

10. Using Video to Add More Context

Video is really the ultimate storytelling communication tool. It provides a massive amount of context to our user persona's story.

We can utilize our core user persona imagery or even our context-enhanced imagery to create short videos that help bring our personas to life even more. Take one of your user persona images and load it up into an Ai tool like Luma or Runway. You can then leave the prompt field open if you like and have the tool create a short video on its own or you can play creative director and create a simple prompt that spurs the tool to move in the scene direction you are envisioning. Like adding ocean waves!

Text/Image-to-Video Ai tools can be tricky to use and as of right now they have low success rates if you are giving them an image to work from. This constrains their ability to go off and use their ideas to produce the video with. So prepare to be patient!

Getting Started Building Enhanced User Personas

If you are new to using Ai tools or even are familiar with the Ai tools used in these examples, my recommendation is to focus on perfecting one or two methods that could benefit you the most to start out with.

Remember, I've been working with these tools every day for the past two years and it's jerks like me that can make things look easier than they are. It's also impossible to cover all of the potential issues, challenges, and nuances you will encounter as you begin to use Ai to create enhanced user personas.

Be patient! Invest the upfront time to get the basics down and pretty soon you'll be able to create stories with better user personas in a shorter amount of time than ever before!

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Interested in learning all of the detailed steps for creating enhanced user personas and a whole gob more of tips, tricks, and techniques for using Ai for design?

The next Design x Ai Workshops cohort group launches on January 21 and we've got a couple of seats left onboard. ??

This 4-session series will accommodate U.S. and Europe time zones. We do mini Ai projects for a new company based upon the group's ideas!

The dates and times for the sessions:

January 21 :: Ai Foundations

January 23 :: Ai UX/CX Discovery

January 28 :: Ai UX Design

January 30 :: Ai Visual Design

All sessions will start at 7a PT / 3p GMT.

\\\ About Design x Ai Workshops ///

The workshops are a live, private collaborative sessions with other talented designers from around the world. They are a progressively sequential series where we build upon foundational basics to learn exclusive advance techniques as we create our own Ai experience design mini-sprint project (based upon attendees suggestions for a new company!).

\\\ Featured Tools ///

+ ChatGPT

+ Figma

+ Product Context Analyzer

+ Midjourney

+ Relume

+ Runway

+ Photoshop Beta

+ Magnific

+ Topaz Photo Ai

+ Jasper

\\\ Specs ///

+ 4 separate live 2.5 - 3hr workshops

+ Interactive Ai tool demos

+ For all professional levels & types of designers

+ 40 Ai design methods+ 30 exclusive advanced techniques

+ Recordings of each workshop

+ Downloadable PDFs of the content covered in each workshop

+ Galaxy-sized Design x Ai Workshops FigJam board that is the navigational guide & playground for the workshops

Email [email protected] or DM me to start the reservation process!

You can find the latest detailed information about the workshops in the official Design x Ai Workshops Guide PDF or head over to the Workshops page at Superunknown Studios ??