A LIFE-CENTRED DIGITAL DESIGN INNOVATION CONCEPT
Non-human Personas in UX
A life-centred UX innovation concept exploring how non-human personas can give nature and invisible communities a voice in UX and digital product decision-making
What this project explores
This project investigates how non-human and non-user personas can be applied within UX practice to support more sustainable, inclusive, and responsible digital outcomes. The scope of exploration includes:
UX Decision-making
How design teams prioritise features, trade-offs, and success metrics.
Digital Product Behaviour
How interface patterns influence consumption, visibility, and impact.
Invisible Stakeholders
How ecosystems, animals, and marginalised or absent human groups are affected by digital systems.
Design Culture & Collaboration
How shared artefacts can support cross-disciplinary understanding and long-term thinking.
About the project subject
The Experimenting with Non-Human Personas and UX project applied non-human personas to a real online grocery experience, treating elements like food products, delivery systems, and packaging as actors with needs.
By doing so, it revealed hidden tensions and opportunities in the user flow that conventional personas overlook, helping designers rethink assumptions about impact and responsibility in digital commerce.
The life-centred design lens used in this project
“How might UX designers use non-human personas to support users, business, and the living systems the digital tech industry impacts?”
This project applies a user persona with a non-human persona (NHPs) as a life-centred design lens.
Rather than focusing only on active users, the work explores how designers can represent nature, vulnerable communities, and impacted systems as first-class considerations in the design process. These personas act as narrative and ethical anchors, helping teams consider consequences that fall outside traditional UX metrics.
The lens shifts design from serving isolated user needs to supporting broader living systems.
The problems and opportunities
Most digital products are designed around a narrow definition of “the user”, leading to unintended harm.
As a result, well-intentioned products can reinforce extractive or exclusionary systems.
Impacts remain invisible
Environmental and social impacts remain invisible during design and product discussions
Harmful by default
Sustainability is treated as a technical constraint, not a design responsibility
Powers remain abstract
Teams struggle to translate abstract impact goals into everyday UX choices
Short-term by default
Long-term consequences are deprioritised in favour of short-term optimisation
Key insight: Giving nature and invisible people a seat at the table
Non-human and non-user personas function as representation tools, ensuring that ecosystems, animals, and vulnerable groups are considered during prioritisation, ideation, and review.
By externalising these perspectives, teams are less likely to overlook who or what is affected by their decisions.
Key Insight: Turning abstract impact into concrete UX considerations
Personas translate complex environmental and social impacts into relatable narratives. This helps designers move from vague sustainability goals to clearer questions about harm, responsibility, and opportunity within specific UX flows.
Key insight: Enabling collaboration across teams and partners
Because personas are shareable artefacts, they support collaboration beyond design teams. Product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders can engage with the same life-centred reference point, creating a shared language for impact-aware decision-making.
The Life-centred Shift
From:
Designing only for users who interact with a product
To:
Designing with awareness of the wider systems, lives, and environments that digital products affect
Learn how to create and innovate with Non-human Personas
