Written by This blog post is a collaboration between Megan Davis of Spendlove and Lamb and Dr Maria Camacho, both independent practitioners who are part of the Future Skills Academy. Through our collective expertise in storytelling, design thinking, and human-centred innovation, we help professionals develop the critical capabilities needed in today’s rapidly evolving world. In this blog, we’ll explore methods for building empathy with your customers, delving beyond standard approaches to persona creation, and uncovering the emotional depth that drives more meaningful user insights.
Personas in Practice: Dr. Maria Camacho
Too often, especially in tech-led environments, personas are treated as little more than an afterthought. Perhaps you’ve seen them used to justify minor UI tweaks or to adopt a software solution rather than to uncover the real people behind the screens.
Imagine you’re asked to lead the human-centred design side of a significant digital transformation project. At the outset, you discover no other design professionals on the team. Your colleagues proudly show you the project strategy, filled with diagrams of computers, databases, and buildings. Yet something is missing. You can’t help but ask: Where are the people?
In response, you organise a workshop to map out the problem visually. You add icons for doctors, nurses, call centre staff, software developers, managers—anyone who might be affected by the project. This slight adjustment, inserting people directly into the diagrams, transforms your team’s perspective. Suddenly, you’re not just implementing a system; you’re considering the experiences of real, everyday users.
Of course, the work doesn’t end there. Once you identify who is involved and impacted, the next step is delving deeper into why they behave as they do. It is best to approach this like a therapist. Suppose someone named Claudia shares her personal stories, anxieties, and motivations. In that case, you’ll listen closely, formulate hypotheses, and search for hidden reasons behind her actions.
Personas should function in much the same way. Rather than relying on surface-level demographics, you want to capture why people do what they do, not just what they do.
When done well, a persona becomes so clear and detailed that you’d recognise that person if you ran into them at a party. It brings them to life—their quirks, frustrations, and aspirations—all of which inform how you design products or services.
To achieve this depth, keep a few principles in mind:
- Keep It Simple and Visual
- Choose a format you can effortlessly reference throughout the project. Sometimes, a life-size cutout or a highly visual template helps maintain empathy better than pages of text.
- Communicate Instant Insights
- Use icons, photographs, or any visual material to convey the person’s context and characteristics at a glance. The less you have to read, the easier to empathise quickly.
- Supplement with Continuous Research
- Remember, a persona doesn’t contain every insight you gather from user interviews. Keep revisiting and expanding your research, so the persona remains a living document.
- Experiment with Your Format
- Don’t feel pressured to use a standard A4 page with rigid boxes. Design your approach to inspire genuine empathy and be memorable enough for your team to use.
By crafting personas thoughtfully and using them consistently, you ensure that human experiences guide your design decisions rather than superficial assumptions. Revisit and refine them regularly as new insights emerge, and you’ll maintain a truly human-centred approach, leading to solutions that resonate with real people’s needs.
From Two-Dimensional to Three-Dimensional Personas: Megan Davis
Dr. Maria highlighted a critical question: “Where are the people?” Many of us who practise design thinking have experienced the frustration of seeing personas reduced to a few bullet points or clichéd descriptions—think, “busy mother of three, loves her family but never has time for herself. “They feel two-dimensional, offering little more than surface-level demographics.
I created the Empathy Flower tool to break this cycle. My goal was to help people move from two-dimensional personas to those that feel genuinely three-dimensional—real individuals with motivations, desires, and fears that inform their behaviour. As Dr. Maria says, someone you would recognise if you met them at a party. As some of you may know, I’ve been an actor since I was seven. When I first encountered design thinking and saw a typical persona, I wondered: “If this were a character, how would I portray them?” Most standard personas don’t provide the emotional or psychological detail an actor needs to inhabit a role. The information you require to make a persona feel real, like a character. This is what must and can happen in persona development.
The gap between the typical persona format and real human nuance is precisely why I set out to develop a practical method that helps designers, product teams, and other professionals go beyond the bare bones. Where are the emotional cues, the subtle motivations, the unspoken words? Understanding these elements transforms personas into a living, breathing resource that deepens empathy and guides more human-centred outcomes.
The Empathy Flower: Bringing Language and Emotion into Focus
In acting, everything begins with the script—the words on the page are all we have to figure out who a character is and what drives them. We notice not just what they say but how they say it and what they don’t say. This level of nuance is often missing from standard user research documentation, where lengthy interviews can be distilled into a few bullet points on a persona template.
The Empathy Flower process captures these subtleties. Here is how it works:
- Collect Authentic Language
- During user interviews, pay close attention to the exact words people use. Jot down your feelings, note the emotional tone, and observe.
- Group by Emotional Themes
- Sort these quotes and observations according to the feeling or motivation behind them. Are they expressing frustration? Relief? Anxiety? Joy?
- Name and Synthesise
- Assign names or short descriptors to these emotional clusters. This is where the persona gains dimension. You begin to see the undercurrents—why someone feels stretched as a busy mother of three or what truly drives a tech-savvy early adopter.
- Re-assign to Your Persona
- Incorporate these newly named emotional themes into your working persona. Now, your persona goes beyond demographics or a job title. It is enriched with real human sentiments, making it more helpful in guiding design decisions.
Focusing on how people speak and what it reveals about them preserves vital emotional context and gains clues about deeper motivations. This method ensures you don’t discard the most potent insights that reveal why a person behaves the way they do.
Sign Up for the Empathy Flower Workshops
If you’d like to learn the Empathy Flower process firsthand and bring three-dimensional personas into your practice, I’m hosting two workshops:
- In-Person Workshop in Melbourne
- Date: Next week (limited spots available)
- Location: Mantel Group, 425 Flinders Street, Melbourne
- What You’ll Learn: This is a 45-minute, hands-on session in which you’ll explore how to map out emotional cues and incorporate them into persona development.
- Sign up here!
- Online Series with the Future Skills Academy
- Format: A series of live, virtual workshops
- Sign up to be notified of upcoming days and times here.
Storytelling Built For Innovation 