Summary: Applying Passover seder’s parable of the four children to the design technique of creating personas. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

About 20 years ago, my sister and I wrote our own Haggadah, the book used during the Passover seder. The Haggadah tells the story of Passover, the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, and provides an order (which is what “seder” means) for performing the holiday rituals. Lisa and I, fed up with the Brown family practice of skipping around to hit the important parts and keep things to a length suitable for my dad’s attention span, decided to put our own together. This may seem sacreligious but, frankly, telling the Exodus story in a meaningful and personal way is what Passover is all about.

The seder is filled with symbolism and Lisa and I sought to take advantage of that, by showing how the symbols of Passover are embedded in the story itself. At the time, though, we were teenagers and couldn’t appreciate the larger issues (oppression and liberation) and see how they might be translated to a variety of symbols.

One of the things that we left out of our Haggadah was the four children. (This was either an oversight or an artifact of our own interpretation of what was important.) The number four appears throughout the Passover seder (four questions, four cups of wine) and perhaps represents the four stages of liberation. Since Passover is all about teaching our children about the Jewish liberation, the seder includes descriptions of four types of children who might be present at the meal and the questions they might ask:

• The wise child wants to know about the meaning behind the story.
• The wicked child wants to know why he or she should care about the story.
• The simple child asks the most basic questions, but these should not be ignored or glossed-over.
• The one too young to ask needs to have the story told despite the apparent lack of interest.

I’m in the process of re-writing our Haggadah. With Harry nearly two years old, Sarah and I are trying to create traditions for our burgeoning family. In addition, twenty years after writing our first Haggadah, I see the world differently, Judiasm differently, and interpret the story and the symbols in a new way. In my initial research, I was reminded of the four children (really “four sons”). There are many interpretations of these children, and even a little research reveals great ambiguity in what they symbolize.

To the eyes of a user experience designer, though, these children are ancient personas.

Like personas I might create for a design project, they are abstract. They don’t describe specific children, and don’t even provide examples of these kinds of children. Their abstraction implies that we can’t correlate them to a specific person, but instead use the abstrations to categorize people who might be at the seder–curious, selfish, naive, and uninterested. Likewise, for a design exercise, I might identify categories like prospective customers, new customers, current customers, and preferred current customers. For each category, I can identify their desires and objectives and constraints.

But these personas are actually different from the seder’s four children. They’re no less fuzzy, but they do represent different objectives and different tasks. Imagine we’re designing an online banking application: the objectives and tasks for a new customer are mostly different from those of a current customer. The tasks and objectives define the personas.

This isn’t the case with the four children. The objective is set by the seder: teach your progeny about the liberation of the Israelites, no exceptions. What the built-in personas tell us is not that we have to support different objectives, but that we might have to employ different teaching styles to accommodate different kinds of learning.

Have you ever written personas like that?

These are personas that orbit a single objective and the ways in which people might accomplish that objective is defined in the personas. Writing it down now, it seems self-evident, but my personas have never been framed this way. Instead, typical personas identify user objectives and the product’s requirements must support those objectives. To apply this to a specific example, take online banking. What would objectives look like if not defined by the target audience but instead by the business?

• Help our customers keep a balanced checkbook.
• Help our customers track their spending.
• Help our customers see the benefits of upgrading their accounts.

If these are among the product’s core objectives, we might cast the personas as people who have different styles in their banking: the nit-picker, the worrier, the procrastinator, etc. We need to tell the same story to all these people, but we need to accomodate their individual styles.

One way to interpret the four children is that they represent different aspects of humanity. Or, to state it another way, that all four children are inside each of us. Every person brings unique approaches, hang-ups, and perspectives to the same story. Shouldn’t we be thinking about our product’s target audience in the same way?