Difference between User Personas and Archetypes
When it comes to user experience, user personas and archetypes are two tools that can sometimes be confused. Both tools have many similarities, but they are not exactly the same.
Similarities between User Personas and Archetypes
Personas and archetypes are a way to visualize the same type of information. Both tools summarize research data on users and represent a specific audience. They take into account general behavior, attitudes, motivations, and problems of that group of users.
Differences between User Personas and Archetypes
The most characteristic difference between personas and archetypes is the following:
- User personas are “personified”, and assigned a name, biography, photo, and other personal characteristics, as if they were a real person.
- Archetypes do not take into account all those details, and simply define all the characteristics that represent a group of audience, but without going into personal details.
The archetype of a type of user focuses on basic behavior details, while the user persona shows the same ideas as in the archetype, but some additional details are added to make it memorable and promote empathy.
User personas are well-developed characters, and the realism they offer invites empathy. Giving them a name, face, and realistic motivations makes them more memorable. In addition, a story can be added to explain their characteristics. This also favors memorability, because it is easier to remember a plot and the characters of a story than just a list of data.
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When to choose user personas or archetypes
The main disadvantage of user personas is that they use a single face to represent many real users, which can result in not representing all user groups.
Even if we create multiple user personas to cover all audiences, choosing specific faces and characteristics for each user persona can lead to not everyone being represented, and that can lead to inclusion issues.
Of course, creating an inclusive digital product doesn’t rely solely on creating user personas or archetypes, but it is a step to follow.
The key to choosing whether to create user personas or archetypes lies in the number of audiences for the digital product. If we have three or four different audiences, it makes sense to create multiple personas for each of them. However, if we have ten different audiences, it is better to create an archetype for each audience.
On the other hand, there are occasions when stakeholders do not trust user personas, and archetypes are a good solution. This can happen, for example, when stakeholders know that buyer personas have already been created in the marketing department, but they focus on demographic or brand affinity aspects, and attitudes and behaviors are not as well studied.
In that case, archetypes can be a solution to convince them that it is worth investing effort and research to create new archetypes.
In conclusion, user personas and archetypes offer the same information, but data is represented in different ways. The choice of one type or another will depend on the number of audiences we have to work with, as well as other specific factors of each project, such as skeptical stakeholders.
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