It's likely that you have used user personas if you are familiar with UX design.
Your first step should be to put up a blurb and a photo of a character that brings to life a specific audience's wants, assumptions, background, etc. rather than starting by making a list of characteristics to have a thorough awareness of who their consumers are, which is one of the key differences between those that succeed and those that fail.
Why would you ever want to restrict your customer base, you might be wondering.
Spending a lot of time on customers who aren't a good fit for your product is also emotionally draining for your personnel. You risk losing some of your best employees to burnout if you draw too many users who shouldn't be using your product.
What about the clients who don't fit in?
Additionally, you aren't helping them in any way.
Some people can only be joyful when they are furious at someone. However, the majority of clients who are not a good fit do not want to wind up buying a product that is ineffective for them.
Finally, there are people you don't want to attract because they pose a risk to your clients rather than because it would be a bad deal for them.
The last thing you want to do is create a product or website that serves as a haven for identity thieves or con artists.
In other words, as a designer, you want to raise the chances of attracting the correct consumers while lowering the chances of attracting the wrong ones.
The creation of anti-personas is a wise notion for this reason. The personas of people you either don't want to attract or who you wish to deter from visiting your website or buying your product is known as anti-personas.
People who shouldn't use your product because they could be harmed by it, people who will attempt to use your product to harm others, and people who aren't a suitable fit for the product are the three sorts of people for whom you would wish to design anti-patterns.
1. Those Who Can't Use Your Product Safely
Small toddlers are one of the most obvious examples of anti-patterns since you want to keep them from accidentally hurting themselves.
Imagine you are creating a bottle to hold medications.
Make sure that little children cannot open that bottle and consume the pills. Consequently, you might want to create a fake youngster who has been hit.
Similarly, imagine that you are creating a container for people to use in order to arrange the medications they must take each day of the week.
If you decide to make the container a little more festive, a child anti-persona might advise you to avoid creating a container that will appear to be a really enjoyable toy to a young child.
2. Criminals, con artists, and stalkers
Rarely would most designers require an anti-persona of someone who has to be safeguarded from their product. They'll need to make anti-personas of the folks their product needs to guard against more frequently.
Not everyone who is concerned about security should develop alter egos that counter this danger.
There is no need to spend the effort creating security anti-personas if all your developers need to do is adhere to fundamental, industry-standard security best practices.
Or, to put it another way, you have a problem that no anti-persona is going to be able to solve if your product owner and developers require an anti-persona to remind them to think about two-factor authentication and to make sure the product has protections against injection attacks.
But suppose you work at a bank. Every time you create a new product, you should consider all the possible ways that a clever hacker or con artist could exploit it to steal your customers' money, identities, etc.
That requires strengthening the bank's security measures as well as developing methods to keep an eye out for attempted and successful break-ins.
The creation of one or more anti-personas could be quite helpful in that situation.
3. Those Clients Who Don't Fit
It's not difficult to create anti-personas that deal with safety and security issues. Customers who are a horrible fit are the last category of anti-personas, and they are more challenging.
There's a good chance you'll run into two categories of clients who aren't a good fit.
Customers who will never purchase your stuff are the first.
Most of the time, it isn't worthwhile to adopt an antagonistic stance toward these clients.
If a company has a lot of clients who frequently browse but never make a purchase, it's not a big concern because scaling up a site has gotten so much cheaper and simpler as the world gets more digital.
Many digital goods are created especially to draw large numbers of non-paying clients. If you have a to-do app, for instance, you might need lots of nonpaying users to build a successful sales funnel and to make the app so well-liked that it draws in paying customers.
Long-term sustainable business growth can be possible for your company if you adopt an anti-persona that aids in keeping this important clientele in mind.
This kind of anti-persona is very helpful in helping you strike the correct balance in those situations.
Your product might intimidate them.
They don't anticipate using your tool more than a few times; rather than purchasing it to address a technical issue, they do so to express who they are.
How are anti-personas made?
Employing the same methods you used to develop your personas, such as conducting interviews, online research, brainstorming, and so on.
However, developing successful anti-personas frequently calls for a shift in emphasis or a new arrangement of competing trade-offs.
Here are some suggestions on how to modify your persona-creation techniques so that you can produce anti-personas that can aid in the creation of designs that satisfy the requirements of your client.
1. Analyze the Existing Quantitative and Qualitative Data
You should start with any quantitative and qualitative data you have available as one of your first steps.
For instance, Google Analytics can teach you a lot about how visitors utilize your website.
Another excellent resource for learning who is using your products, who is unhappy with them, and why, is social media.
Negative customer reviews left by customers who bought your goods or similar products can also be very beneficial.
Imagine that too many people are criticizing the price of your product, which is marketed as a luxury item. You might require an anti-persona that encapsulates the characteristics of these clients and directs your attention to the best ways to design your website, etc. to turn them off so they won't be let down.
2. Talk to the Users
Anybody who is developing user personas will take advantage of any chance to speak with both past and present users. It's a more complicated tale when it comes to anti-personas.
To begin with, it may be challenging to locate the ideal clients for creating a strong anti-persona.
Given that chatting with customers can be fairly labor-intensive, you might determine that even if you can discover the ideal clients, it isn't worth the effort.
Personas frequently need to capture subtleties that are difficult to see unless you talk to individuals in order to be fully effective.
Additionally, if you run an online forum, Slack channel, or another type of online community, the administrators will be quite familiar with the types of users who make excellent material for an anti-persona.
Sometimes it helps to be up forward about what you're doing when interviewing employees who interact often with users.
3. Talk to the Staff
You may even define an anti-persona for them before asking if they have any suggestions for anti-personas you should create.
It might be beneficial to hold brainstorming meetings with various staff groups.
For instance, using a strategy akin to card sorting, you could ask staff to come up with a list of the actions of irate clients, group the Post-it notes, then take a step back and see if the groups serve to elicit one or more anti-personas.
You should also conduct staff interviews and/or brainstorm with those who are in charge of keeping an eye on and thwarting malevolent users if you want to develop security-related anti-personas.
Again, it may be helpful to be clear about your efforts to create anti-personas in this situation.
To build successful levels of security against attackers, one must adopt an adversarial mindset. And the only way to do that is to have a clear picture of who your adversaries are.
Personas and Anti-personas should be developed iteratively at the same time
Some UX designers argue that writing up your user personas first is the best method to develop anti-personas.
That inclination makes sense. It seems like a more methodical way to organize the tasks.
Herein lies the drawback of that strategy.
We believe they are mistaken.
Finding the right balance between and pushing away is a key component of design.
Consider constructing a drug dispenser as an illustration.
You want to make it challenging for kids to open the dispenser, as we explained previously.
At the same time, you want to make it as simple as you can for older individuals and anyone who have arthritis or other hand-related chronic conditions that make opening containers challenging.
You can understand how difficult it is to strike the right balance if you've ever sworn while attempting to open a "childproof" lid.
It might be more logical to create both the anti-persona of a child and the user persona of an elderly person at the same time, iteratively.
Similarly, if you create the user personas and the anti-personas simultaneously, it might be simpler to strike a compromise between security requirements and usability.
This is especially true if you expect to spend a lot of time conversing with the personnel.
If you start by having customer service representatives complain about the annoying customer behavior that will be incorporated into anti-personas, it might be simpler to collect meaningful user persona information from them.
Consider Establishing Feedback
User identities typically evolve over time. However, designers frequently neglect to update them.
That is not unexpected. The staff may already have a strong enough instinctive sense of who the company's most valuable clients are, so investing time in fine-tuning the personalities isn't always worthwhile.
But with some anti-personas, it can be beneficial to return to them frequently.
There is a good chance that the firm you are creating will significantly evolve if there are several security threats. The mice become smarter as you build better mousetraps.
Updated anti-personas could be quite helpful if staff members need to think like the adversary to foresee the next set of techniques for assaulting your product if the company is to keep up with the rodents.
Finally, you might not have enough experience at first to create accurate anti-personas in the situation of bad fit anti-personas. As a result, you might need to make adjustments as your company grows.
What are Anti-Personas, then?
Anti-personas can be a very useful tool if they are created properly.
Your design can significantly contribute to a company's ability to attract the right clients while avoiding the wrong ones, which can help them establish a successful firm.
If you’re unable to achieve Antipersonas on your own, let Dezy It help you!
We, at Dezy It do it through:
Empathizing with the customer through understanding their perspectives, problems, aspirations, pain points, etc.
Giving our heart and soul into the project we are handed over with so that updates can be carried out along with keeping up with their deadlines.
To learn more about our services or product, you can click here.