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Step 3: Develop Empathy

To really achieve the change that will bring about your vision, you must first change peoples’ behavior. You can’t arm rhinos with bazookas or convince sage-grouse to move to the city.

The first step is to identify stakeholders—all of the people that can affect or will be affected by the change you want to see. Then, you will seek to develop empathy for key stakeholders and their needs/problems. This will provide insight into a solution that is more likely to be adopted, supported, persist, and create real change.

Create a stakeholder list. Search or ask around to build out your list. Consider government agencies, NGOs, academia, individual businesses, industry groups, segments of the population, etc. Group stakeholders to create a manageable list if possible, but try not to obscure the efforts of individual organizations. For example, if Molson-Coors is very active in your area of interest, keep them separate. If you're more worried about the impact of beverage companies in general, group them together. As you're building your list, capture a sentence or two about why they are relevant so you don’t forget.

You can categorize stakeholders based on how directly you can influence them. Stakeholders that you can directly influence are Boundary Partners. Stakeholders that you can work with directly, but can’t influence, are Strategic Partners. Stakeholders that you can influence, but not directly, are your boundary partners’ boundary partners. Stakeholders that are not influenceable and can’t be targeted directly are not relevant (yet). Think of your boundary partners as customers, you need to ‘sell’ your solution to your boundary partners. Your strategic partners support you and provide components of your solution that you don’t focus on.

For each of your boundary partners (potential customers), develop a persona profile. If necessary, you can create multiple personas for a single boundary partner. For example, if you included farmers as a boundary partner, you may need to distinguish between farmers who derive their entire income from farming and hobby farmers. If you are trying to influence a very targeted set of stakeholders, you may simply research the specific people you are targeting, rather than generalized personas. In either case, the process is largely the same.

The challenge is drafting personas that contain relevant facts based on truth. While short, personas must be well researched. To do persona research, you can use ethnography and psychographic research methods. Read relevant literature, studies, or surveys that have been conducted, search out their blogs, read their periodicals, imagine a day in the life. Use the framework of thinks/sees/feels/does. Understand their mental models—how do they think about the problem space? Consider their primary interests which most drive their behavior.

Develop persona hypotheses—expectations that you have about their character, how they see the world, what their background is, etc. Conduct exploratory interviews (develop an interview guide first) to test your hypotheses (you might combine this with interviews to explore problem hypotheses at the same time, see step 4). Focus on common, not idiosyncratic, characteristics. Refine. Repeat.

Don’t stop until you have a clear mental picture of the persona, and you are confident that you have segmented your stakeholders into the right personas. Consider this a process, not a product. Keep updating personas as you continue to understand the problem space and your solution. Good personas are real, exact, actionable, clear, and testable (REACT). What do they like to do on the weekend?

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From Our Work

In designing the Pollinator Scorecard, we developed personas around three groups: ‘Wingtips’, ‘Steel Toes’, and ‘Tevas’. These user groups divided our target industry in a way that best reflected their uses for, and ability to use, the Pollinator Scorecard. It was helpful to both the project team in designing the Scorecard (by putting us in our users’ ‘shoes’, so to speak) and when presenting the Scorecard to users to help them understand why we made the design decisions we did.