Why two layers and not one
A persona on its own is one specific person. A pile of personas without structure is hard to reason about. The archetype layer gives you the structure: it says here are five distinct ways people in this audience approach decisions, and then each archetype is realised as multiple personas with the same behavioral DNA but different identities, life context, memory, and language.
Archetypes are good for thinking. Personas are good for interviewing.
The archetypes view
Each archetype card shows you the shape, not the people. The key fields:
- Name and description: the human label and a paragraph on what makes this archetype distinct.
- Defining dimensions: the specific axes that make this archetype different from the others, shown as tags like risk_orientation: cautious or tooling_preference: minimal. Hover any tag to see why this dimension is distinctive for this archetype. There are 3 to 5 defining dimensions per archetype.
- OCEAN profile (ranges): the Big Five personality traits, but shown as min-max ranges rather than single values. An archetype might run Openness 0.55-0.75, meaning every persona in this archetype falls somewhere in that band. The bands are how archetypes hold together as behavioral shapes while still producing variation across personas.
- Primary biases: the cognitive biases this archetype carries, each shown with an intensity range. Status quo bias (0.5-0.7) means every persona in this archetype carries that bias somewhere in that band.
Archetype cards collapse by default to the name and description. Click Show details to expand the dimensions, OCEAN ranges, and biases. Worth doing for every archetype before you start interviewing. It tells you what differences to expect and which conversations are worth running.
The personas view
Each persona is one of those archetype shapes brought to life. The persona card in the list shows:
- Name: a believable first + last name.
- Short descriptor: a single line capturing who they are and the situation they’re in.
- Demographics pills: quick-reference tags like age, occupation, location, household, business size. The exact axes shown depend on whether the audience is B2C or B2B.
- OCEAN radar chart: a small radar chart with all five Big Five traits plotted. Persona-level OCEAN is a single value per trait (each persona is sampled from somewhere inside their archetype’s range).
- Primary biases: top three biases for this specific persona, with intensities to one decimal.
- Quality dot: a small coloured dot next to the name. Green means every internal quality check passed, amber means at least one raised a warning, red means at least one failed. Hover it for the overall quality figure.
- Evidence verdict: a separate chip, such as Well-evidenced, reflecting how well the audience data behind this persona’s traits actually supports them. This is a different thing from the quality dot: the dot is about internal consistency, the chip is about grounding. See the persona profile guide for what feeds each.
Click any persona card to open the full profile and start interviewing.
How to use the two surfaces together
- Read archetypes first. They tell you what you’re looking at. Without that frame, every persona feels equally important.
- Pick personas to interview from across archetypes, not within one. Three personas from the same archetype will give you three flavors of the same view. One persona from each of three archetypes gives you genuine difference.
- When tensions show up in synthesis, look at the archetypes. Genuine tensions almost always trace to two archetypes pulling in opposite directions on a specific defining dimension. That’s the build-or-pivot signal.
A note on rigor
The archetype layer isn’t a stylistic flourish. It’s the difference between simulated personas that all sound the same and personas that genuinely disagree with each other in ways grounded in measurable behavioral differences. Big Five ranges, bias intensities, and defining dimensions are all calibrated against research data; the archetype is what holds them together as a coherent shape.
Where to go next