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Todays thread: Why I think personas in UX/UI/interaction design are usually not worth the effort. 1/19
Personas try to enhance empathy for the end users by making them more real. A user is an abstract, ambiguous and elastic concept, prone to be interpreted in conflicting ways and suiting each party’s needs. 2/19
Personas make the users more real and remove the ambiguity. It’s a clear improvement to just talking about “users”. 3/19
Since personas are a concept easy to understand, they are easily accepted as something we should do as part of our design. Understandable concepts are great compared to complex models and diagrams. 4/19
However, especially the intuitive idea of personas is a dead end: they tend to be interpreted as similar to characters in a novel or a film, with physical capabilities, traits, hobbies, history, etc. 5/19
These colorful characters intuitively seem to be the right tool for us to empathize our users. How could we not? They are so well and vividly drawn that we must be able to do it! But actually that’s not true. 6/19
A central part of empathizing is to understand the behavior of users: what are they doing or trying to accomplish. The glossy images of personas do not emphasize describing behavior, goals or motivations. Or at least the obvious interpretation does not include it. 7/19
This makes personas more like caricatures: the stingy single parent, the culture-loving elderly lady, … And thus we are prone to lose the ability to see people, our users, as multifaceted and situational as they are. 8/19
For grocery shopping, today our user might be in a hurry: something to eat for the kids and fast. But on Friday, the same person has time and is willing to buy something a bit special. This is one person, but easily two personas. 9/19
Good personas focus on modeling user behavior and not characters. But that’s no longer intuitive, it’s harder to do and thus you see this type of personas much more rarely. 10/19
It’s like use cases — anyone still remember them? They weren’t that bad, you just had to know how to write them (lol), but most people used them in the trivial way they found intuitive and thus made them bad. 11/19
Or like user stories: the concept is good, but the trivial format of “As a _ I want to _ to achieve _” is trivial, foolish, misleading, has low data density and should be thrown to the dustbin of history. I hope you’re not using them, are you? More on them some other day. 12/19
But back to personas: Getting them right is hard, and getting them wrong (the novel characters) is easy. Sounds dangerous, but perhaps they offer loads of value? (Spoiler: no, they don’t.) 13/19
Writing personas become easily substitute work for doing the actual design. Writing them may be fun, but it’s not the point. We need the design. Personas are only a means to get it. 14/19
We easily just pour our stereotypes into personas without ensuring that such people actually exist. Ever heard of the US Air Force average pilot? If not, check this out: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html">https://www.thestar.com/news/insi... (Thanks @olkkomi for the example!) 15/19
Empathy is not the same as knowing what our users need to do. If we want to build software that supports our users while they are doing their things, we need to know what those things are. 16/19
Personas are not well suited to storing information of what our users need to do. They tell what the users are like, but that’s a different thing. Of those two, what they do is indispensable, but we can easily do without the name, image and traits. 17/19
There are situations where naming and bringing life into our different users is beneficial, and personas, even in the suboptimal descriptive form, can be very useful there. 18/19
But personas as a concept are in no way a prerequisite for design. The time spent in creating them could and should be spent on more productive actions, like field studies or doing the actual design. 19/19
