The needs and interests of people impacted by male contraceptive methods are diverse, and they evolve over time. "Personas" help understand and design for those interests and needs.

Personas* are incredibly useful tools in user-centered design, marketing, and other disciplines focusing on customers or “users”. A persona is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. They are particularly useful during ideation activities for new products and services as they allow for the extrapolation of user preferences to inform attributes, thereby removing some of the ambiguity inherent in new product design. Male contraception is an especially ripe field of product design for persona generation and application given the lack of additional methods to date coupled with decades of knowledge around experiences with female methods.

Male Contraception & Personas

Male Contraception "Users"

Male contraception also presents an interesting opportunity for persona generation and use given its universal applicability and value: everyone benefits from new contraceptive methods. It is also a unique use case for personas given the expanded understanding of genders in our increasingly non-binary world. Egg and Sperm producers can utilize new male methods to better manage their family planning needs. As we work towards creating a world with reproductive autonomy for all, it is critically important that the design of new contraceptive methods take into consideration as many users, beneficiaries, and intermediaries as possible.

USERS
This group is defined as the individuals that will take or utilize the next generation of contraceptives designed for men.

BENEFICIARIES
This group includes individuals who will benefit from the next generation of male contraceptives without having to take or use these products themselves.

INTERMEDIARIES
This group is composed of individuals that will neither take, nor directly benefit from the next generation of male contraceptives, but still have a vested interest in ensuring their development.

Male Birth Control Persona Stakeholder Groups

Men's Reproductive Journey

​Akin to women’s experiences, MCI anticipates that men’s interests and needs with respect to contraceptive preferences will evolve over the course of their lives. Lived experiences will influence choice: for example, a man aged 55 who already has children will have drastically different needs than an 18-year-old just starting their reproductive journey.

​As such, we have endeavored to articulate the various stages of a man’s reproductive experience in order to better speculate the different personas that represent future users of male contraceptives, as well as the beneficiaries and intermediaries present in each phase:

LEARNING
The initial stage, this is when a young man begins thinking about sex and establishes the foundation of their understanding of sexuality and relationship dynamics.

EXPLORING
The next stage involves a man getting to know their sexuality and experimenting with sex irrespective of relationship status and without a focus on conceiving a child.

DECIDING
The third phase finds a man at the juncture in life where he is considering life events like getting married and having children, or not.
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CONCLUDING
The final stage, this is when a man has ultimately completed their reproductive journey, whether that includes fathering children or not.
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Male Birth Control Persona Life Stages

Meet the Personas

In an effort to capture the evolving ecosystem of male contraception users, beneficiaries, and intermediaries, we grouped them by life stage:

Click on the image or the button for each of the phases in order to avail the profiles for the personas that represent them:

Learning Personas

Exploring Personas

Deciding Personas

Concluding Personas

Using the Personas

Personas are fictional characters created as stand-ins or avatars for the different types of individuals that may use or be impacted by a product. They allow for the development of a deeper understanding of users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals by allowing you to empathize with another’s reality and point of view. As such, it is important to identify and expand different user characteristics in order to make the personas as rooted in reality as possible.

To help get you started with using the personas for ideation purposes, we have created a page dedicated to various games, activities, and workshop agendas. We encourage you to try these out, and reach out to us with any questions or suggestions. Please also be sure to share any outputs from your persona design activities with us!

Persona Activities

(Please note: there are many different ways that one can utilize personas in ideation activities, and we encourage everyone to explore as many different approaches to using them as possible. Organizations like Quicksand, Interaction Design Foundation, Open Design Kit, IDEO, Development Impact & You, Session Lab, and others are great resources for inspiration on how to utilize design thinking and personas, so please be sure to seek out additional information to help guide your work.)

* - Disclaimer: The development of these personas was conducted as a design exercise. The foundation of the exercise is the qualitative understanding of the male contraception ecosystem that MCI has developed through our work. We have engaged with stakeholders that we feel are a holistic representation of this ecosystem: researchers, funders, regulatory agencies, government officials, product developers, marketers, students, parents, advocates, potential users, and the general public in general. The following is intended to be provocative. Our hope is that this will catalyze conversations that help elucidate the male contraception field, and that these discussions afford us all the opportunity to understand and imagine who will use, benefit from, and advocate for male contraceptive methods.