UX Hack: Building realistic proto-personas with Jung’s archetypes

Jung's 12 archetypes

In user experience, personas play a pivotal role in understanding and empathizing with users. Just some background for those who are not too familiar with personas -Personas are fictional characters, that we create to embody the various user types that might interact with a product or service that we design. Ultimately they help inform the design and creation of a product to ensure that product we design is user-centric.

When crafting UX personas we need to delve deep into the minds of our users; to understand their motivations, behaviours, and desires. This is sometimes is a costly and time consuming exercise that unfortunately most companies today can’t do, due to the lack of funds and resources. A quick hack, is to create proto-personas using Carl Jung’s framework - his theory of archetypes.

Carl Jung, is a renowned Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, he proposed that humans share a collective unconscious, a pool of universal symbols and patterns inherited from ancestral experiences. In this framework, he outlines archetypes - the fundamental characters or themes that have emerge repeatedly in myths, stories, and dreams across cultures and eras.

These archetypes are great to use as templates for your proto-personas, since they work really well across diverse demographics and cultures. They allow also you to create proto-personas that feel authentic, relatable, and compelling.

Currently Jung’s archetypes are being used in many other fields of practice like; in marketing to create a brand personality and in works of fictional to shape characters in compelling stories, so why not use it in UX?

Ultimately, I believe leveraging of these archetypes to create proto-personas can lead to more empathetic, intuitive, and user-centred product that resonates you’re your users on a profound level.

Here's a nice site that will get you started on understanding each archetype, their personality trait, habits and preferences: https://mapandfire.com/field-guide/brand-archetypes/