Archetypes and personas used for UX work contain similar insights, are based on similar kinds of data, and differ mainly in presentation. Personas are presented as a single human character, whereas archetypes are not tied to specific names or faces.

Personas and archetypes in UX are two slightly different ways of visualizing the same kinds of insights. Both summarize user research data: they are representations of audience clusters, capturing major areas of overlap in user behaviors, attitudes, motivations, pain points, and goals.

The difference between them is in whether each one of those user types is presented as a specific human character. With personas, we invent a (plausible) name, bio, photo, and other personal characteristics, whereas with archetypes, we omit those details and refer to the user type merely by an abstract label that represents the defining behavioral or attitudinal characteristics of that user type.

Archetypes are modeled around a behavioral perspective.

Examples of an archetypes could be a leisure browser, photography centric, task centric, or identity centric models. Using archetypes gives us a better view of behavior in interaction design.

A user archetype that focuses on core behavioral details

A persona showing the same insights as the archetype, but with some extra details intended to make it memorable and empathetic

Both the archetype and the persona represent the same user type and contain the same core insights about this user type’s needs, behaviors, goals, pain points, and even motivations. Both can serve to compare different user priorities and motivations (e.g., the reliability-focused comparison shopper vs. the interior designer that wants to deliver a harmonious look for clients). But archetypes are abstract, while personas wear a human face.

Archetypes Can Work When There’s Resistance to Persona Research

A potential advantage of archetypes over personas occurs when there is resistance to personas at all within the company. Two common examples are:

1. Team members are skeptical about personas altogether (perhaps because they don’t seem rigorous or because some stakeholders have had unhelpful experiences with personas in the past). Archetypes can avoid some of the baggage that lousy personas have created, allowing the team to still benefit while avoiding a negative halo effect.
2. The organization has already put resources into marketing-focused personas that aren’t very helpful for UX work (for example, because they are heavily focused on demographics or brand affinities, rather than attitudes and behaviors).

In cases such as these, it is often difficult or impossible to convince your team or your stakeholders that it’s worth the time and effort to research and create new personas. Instead, it may be worthwhile to create archetypes as part of the analysis work already being done as part of other discovery-oriented qualitative UX research, such as interviews; this approach can prevent the perception of duplicate effort.

Summary

Personas and archetypes are functionally the same. They represent the same data and insights about our users’ behaviors, attitudes, goals, and pain points. The difference between them is that personas have a human face, with a name and biographical information, whereas archetypes take the form of an abstraction.