Recognize anyone? Whether or not you do, according to The Royal Society we judge within milliseconds if someone is like us and belongs to our “in-group” or not. We tend to favor people we consider among our “in-group” and that in-turn effects our decisions without us realizing it.

One of the primary reasons we create personas is to help the team avoid unnecessary or unconscious bias.

According to dictionary.com, bias is defined as:

a particular tendency, trend, inclination, feeling, or opinion, especially one that is preconceived or unreasoned

This preconceived or unreasoned judgement can no doubt have an influence on our team. Biases are independent of gender, ethnicity, and race. We all have biases. Some we are aware of and can mitigate ourselves while others are unconscious, and those are just our own.

What if I told you there’s an easy, already proven method that has been working for decades from another field?

It’s been under our nose this whole time.

Once upon a time, in my earlier days I was a ‘sequential artist’. I told stories with pictures… Okay, I drew comics, pamphlets etc, for the U.S. Navy. I originally went back to school to study sequential art. Which is where I discovered and fell in love with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics — The Invisible Art. To this day, one of the most influential books on how I do my job.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud breaks down abstracting images or cartooning. For our purposes we’re focusing on faces.

By stripping down an image to it’s essential “meaning” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.” — Scott McCloud

Again, our goal with personas or proto-personas is to create realistic representations of our users to enable stakeholders, designers, developers, and everyone in the process empathize with the human beings that will eventually be in-front of our screens.

We can mitigate a lot of potential bias by abstracting or cartooning our personas. By stripping down the user photo to it’s ‘essential meaning’.

The more we abstract a face, the more universal it becomes. The more universal it becomes, the more we are able to amplify the true meaning of our personas.

Excerpt from Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” — July 1, 1995

With each progressive step of abstraction we can make our persona more inclusive and dramatically cut down the potential for a team member to attach something undesired to one of our personas.

For example: