Designing for diversity: how dynamic personas are reimagining the workplace
The latest episode of the Unworking Podcast with Dr. Imogen Privett delves deep into how dynamic personas can help design workplaces better suited for its ever-changing, complex users
Curating the ‘right’ workplace experience has become a top priority for organisations who are developing strategies to attract employees into the office. Despite this, workplace experience remains deeply subjective. The challenge is to understand and acknowledge the diversity of user needs and create adaptable experiences that can modify to those needs.
In an episode of The Unworking Podcast, Dr. Imogen Privett, director of workplace innovation and senior research associate at UnWork, shares how her journey from academic research into consultancy has shaped her understanding of the workplace. In this podcast episode, Dr. Privett recognises that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to workplace experience, and thus we need to rethink how we design workplaces that respond to different behaviours, expectations, and motivations for being in the office.
Traditional versus dynamic personas
Traditional personas are based on a fictional but data-informed profile of a typical user. They have long been used to help design teams build empathy, prioritise solutions, and understand real user behaviours beyond demographics. However, traditional personas can be somewhat reductive and limiting when assigned to dynamic users.
Dynamic personas, on the other hand, are more fluid and personalised. They allow designers to adapt the profiles over time as the behaviours and usage patterns shift and evolve. This offers a better, nuanced approach and reflects the wide range of user diversity.
Expectations for the workplace are evolving. Dynamic personas are designed to help teams prototype spaces and solutions that feel responsive and relevant to their changing needs. Dynamic personas could be the key to creating workplaces that truly reflect the people who use them.
In this episode, Dr. Privett explores how to create dynamic personas within one organisation and create workplace experiences that don’t conform to ‘typical users’, but adapt to individual behaviours and needs.
Listen to the podcast here.
