Tuesday, February 4, 2020

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't. (Robert Benchley)

I’ve been interested in personality theory since I was in high school. My first love was Myers-Briggs. I still think it has its uses, but I also know it has absolutely no cred in the rarified world of research that I currently operate in. So, it’s been pretty much the Big Five ever since.

That said, I’ll pick up and read anything I can get my hands on if it deals however broadly with personality theory. Now, that does involve a fair amount of stuff that is rather pop psych, but I still find bits and pieces of it pretty useful. Heck, I got the quote for this post off my latest book (the Four Tendencies, by Gretchen Ruben, if you’re interested).

What does this have to do with UX research? Well, a lot, actually. It’s basically what’s behind personas. 

The basic idea here is that there are only so many types of users in the world. Now, this doesn’t mean that you divide your user base into INTJs and ESFPs, or see how many are Conscientious or Agreeable.  

Personas typically don’t care who their users are in essence. It’s much more who they are in certain situations – buying a house, investing, planning a vacation, as a medical patient …

The whole idea is that it’s a lot easier to handle a small universe of people by coming up with some kind of typology. And that, in turn, helps you not design something by default – i.e., for everybody, or for no one in particular, or for yourself …

Done properly, personas are perfect for truly reflecting the actual audience and allowing a design or product team to come up with something that actually is of use to someone and can, thus, be genuinely successful in the marketplace. And I think that’s a very reasonable way to go about it.

So, I guess that makes me the second type of person. Note, though, that that really means I’m someplace in the middle. I’m not throwing out personality typing altogether, nor am I being overly reductionist. Hmm, I wonder what kind of personality type that would make me?  I guess "it depends."


Robert Benchley represents another of my early interests – classic humor writing
(and actually wrote about the foibles of technology once – in his piece “The Railroad Problem”)