97. Small Steps Can Change Personas

Do people ever make a decision or take an action that isn’t totally consistent with an existing persona or story they have about themselves? If the action is small (just a little different from the existing persona), it is possible for people to take an action that is inconsistent with a strong existing persona. Once they take that action, they actually will adjust their persona a little to fit the new action. That means the next thing they are asked to do along those same lines will fit the new persona, and it will be easier for them to continue to take action consistent with this new, revised persona.

Small Commitments Lead to More Action

If you want someone to take action, you need to first get a commitment to something small that will activate a persona, and then you need to ask for a commitment to something larger later. The more public you can get that commitment, the stronger the persona change will be. Making a commitment silently to yourself is not as strong as saying the commitment aloud to someone else. Taking an action, even if small, results in changes to a persona, which will lead to larger actions later on.

Get a Commitment Before the official Call to Action

If one of your goals in your presentation is to get people to take action, build in an earlier step, before the official call to action, to get a small commitment and a small persona change. Then, later, when you ask for the real call to action, you are more likely to see people take action.

For example, I often give presentations about how to improve the usability of software or Web sites. The official call to action might be for someone to read a book or attend a class for more in-depth learning. But often there are people in the session who aren’t totally convinced that improving usability is all that important. So early on in the presentation—sometimes at the very beginning—I have participants do a short exercise in small groups. I have them think about a Web site, software, mobile app, and so on that they used in the last 12 months that was hard to learn and hard to use. I ask them to list what it was about the product that made it hard to use or learn, and what the consequences are of not fixing the problem.

One of the things I am trying to accomplish with the exercise is to get people to personalize the topic. Instead of “I guess it’s important for someone to think about whether products are easy to use,” the internal story becomes “I struggle when things are not easy to use. I wish this product were easy to use. If the product were easier to use I wouldn’t have gotten so frustrated. The people who designed this product should have been paying more attention.” Now the participants in my presentation have changed their personas a little bit. They have, essentially, said to themselves and to others in their group, “I am a person who thinks that paying attention to how usable a product is is a worthwhile and important thing to do.” They will now listen to the rest of my presentation in a different way, and, at the end, when I get to the official call for action, it is much more likely that they will take action.