Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Renee C. Source: Pixabay

Personas are profiles of targeted users that sums up who they are, their backgrounds, behaviours and attitudes in a way that helps inform design decisions for a product, site or service.

A while back, a friend asked for my opinion on personas and whether they were genuinely useful. I had always been a big proponent for personas but his question gave me pause. He was definitely not the first person to tell me that he wasn’t a fan of them, just the latest in line, and that made me wonder why there was such a dislike for personas.

Mistaken and Abused

On the surface, the definition of a persona is easy to understand. It’s a profile of your typical user, given a name and an identity to help guide design decisions, whether you are designing a service or a product, whether you are doing it for profit or not. However, I knew that coming up with personas was not an easy task so I dug deeper with my friend and asked him what he meant by his question.

He went on to elaborate, stating that he felt that personas too easily become broad stroke generalization of the target audience and you would lose all nuisances of designing for the right audience. Specifically, he gave an example of an average software product sales site other a common design pattern like the following:

Screen capture Adobe Creative Cloud site

Now in his defense, my friend was a developer and not in the field of UX himself. His description, however, was an AH-HA moment for me. To me, what he pointed out was more of a segmentation, necessary in a software sales site to funnel users to the right area once they are ready to purchase. However, I do not believe, for one moment, that this is reflective of the many personas Adobe used in the creation of their site.

It’s easy to mistaken the end-result designs as direct translations of the personas themselves when you are trying to backwards-engineer a design without being in the process. However, I think if a persona did translate directly into a design, then something has gone wrong.

This happened on a project I worked on once. Rather than using personas to help figure out what tasks users coming to our site were trying to accomplish, then directing them accordingly, we asked users to identify themselves as one of our personas before they could find the relevant links (much like how segmentation in the screenshot above worked.) But while the screenshot above was deeper into the site, we actually used that interaction as the main homepage element. This confused users and forced additional cognitive load on them rather than take them directly to the information they needed. The design worked (our segments were pretty exclusive luckily) but it didn’t work as well as it could have been. We have redesigned since.

There are, of course, a myriad of other ways personas can get abused. Part of a set of personas’ purpose is to drive and ground design decisions but if they are not used at all, not updated regularly with new research (more on that later), then there isn’t much of a point to them, is there?

Given the number of poorly designed experiences out here, including misused personas like in my case, no wonder personas get a bad rep.

Ungrounded and Unfound

In my early days of learning UX on my own, before UX got all popular enough with lots of online articles, web courses and accessible online courses, I had visions of personas as ideal audiences my designs would target. This would be no further from the truth. (Hey, we were all naive once…right?)

A good, useful set of personas can take months of hard work. They may stem from a business and/or product vision, strategy and goal, but then it’s the job of the UX practitioner to go out and do research to flesh out who in reality are these people you are designing for. And research is such a short word for the breadth of work that needed to be done, from interviews and diary studies to analytics and market and competitive analysis, just to name a few.

The research can lead to groundbreaking insights, from whether it IS the right audience for the product to discovering previously unknown needs. Coupled with the right set of other artifacts (remember the part about using the personas?) such as user journeys and empathy maps at the right moments of the journey, they can tell powerful stories about how users use a product or service. These stories help bring stakeholder buy-in, align decisions and ground conversations in user-centric thinking, especially if they are grounded in reality.

I found the Design Kit site to be particularly helpful in articulating some of the activities that can be done to help form personas.

Too Specific and Too General

Part of my friend’s concern about the use of personas was that they seemed to be too general and too specific at the same time, in that they speak to a particular user but is used to generalize all users. I think, however, that the flaw in viewing a persona in silo. There is never one persona for a product but rather, a set of personas that represent a diversity of users. Still, each persona should also represent general trends found in research, whether it’s in attitudes, background, believes, behaviours and other contexts. People are messy and so I would expect personas are too, such that one persona may contradict another. But together, they should paint a general idea of who the audience is.

Yes, personas can be abused to make generalizations but I believe all designs have to start somewhere. This is why designs need to be tested and iterated on. One of my managers I’ve had in my career always liked to remind me that no designer ever got their design right 100% the first time. Every time I missed something in my design, I try to remind myself of that.

Purpose Built

Personas can be used in a variety of ways. One of my favourite is to use them to ground subsequent design exercises and narrows the focus for individual artifacts. For instance, mapping a user journey would be nearly impossible without a persona in mind for the journey would try to cover too many scenarios and too many types of users. I’ve also heard of instances where UX teams created large cardboard stands of their personas and brought them into design workshops. I have yet to try it but it sounds like a great idea to visually and physically remind others that you are designing for real people, even if your personas are fictional in the first place.

I remember an anecdotal story my instructor at the Centre of Digital Media told me once. At Dreamworks, he was working on a big Hollywood animated film and they would use personas to ground their storytelling. It got to a point that whenever decision makers for the film would argue about a particular direction, someone just had to mention the persona’s name and it would make everyone sit back and rethink their arguments.

I’d like to get to that point someday with personas in my UX practice.

For more information on what personas are and other pro-personas arguments, here’re some articles I found helpful:

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

In Defense of Personas was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In Defense of Personas

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