A love-hate with Personas
Let me start with this – I am a believer. I believe there is a place for personas in true user-centered design work, irrespective of the medium or industry. They are much more 'human' than anything other deliverable in the CX/UX space. Teams love creating them too.
But why then does this artefact get the kind of criticism it does.
Let's start with the what and why
Running a business is a lot like writing a story. You need to set the scene by establishing where you’ll run your business from. You create the plot by determining your venture’s mission, strategies, and goals. You know what else you need?
Characters.
Your business’s characters include its employees, investors and lenders, and—of course—customers. And sometimes, you need to make up characters to move the plot along.
That’s where user personas come in.
What Is A User Persona?
A user persona, also known as a buyer persona, customer persona, or customer avatar, is a made-up character that represents your ideal customer. It is commonly observed that 3 to 5 'kinds of' customers bring 80% of the business. Although you may use real customers as models to build personas, the persona is merely a generalisation.
User personas describe a prototypical user’s goals, product or service needs, background, and knowledge. UX and design teams love creating personas so they know how to build better products for better experience. But user persona benefits extend to so many more parts of the business. Here is a quick slideshow I put together for my team used in the first workshop as we started to explore personas.
Persona is a character that translates customer research into a person you can connect with, market to, design for.
Personas help us remember the research without having to look it up.
As humans we naturally connect with other humans. Putting a face and a name to an audience segment instantly creates empathy and succinctly summarises research findings in a way that is visual, easy to scan and easy to remember.
Personas will help convey how different audience segments will interact with the product differently.
Personas will allow you to insert real actionable data into them that answer: What they want, What they are anxious about, What questions do they have.
Personas can be super-powerful when you step into their shoes and embody your research.
Why then do they fail?
As seen above, personas are a strong tool for the team to come together in a user-centred practice. It is also observed that the individual or team(s) that created them, do not find them to be all that successful.
Below are some common challenges that teams face and how to address them:
Lack of understanding what personas really are. Like any qualitative analysis, they are nota. perfect science and allow for a lot for grey area. And that should be OK! After all they are the best guess on research and analysis. Although made up, No, they are not a lie. Researchers and stakeholders who cannot rely on generalised theme tend to be sceptical of their validity. It is this lack of buy-in that makers it almost impossible for personas to be successful.
In this situation it is important to take time upfront before creating personas to gain alignment–for the stakeholders to understand what exactly they are how they can be helpful to the project although they may not be an exact science. I recommend a workshop or a series of Design Thinking exercises with the team and key stakeholders to gain faith.
Stakeholders have inaccurate expectations as to how personas influence work. Stakeholders often want to get a bang for their buck so many times they can ask for a rather broad persona that can cover a rather large array of products or services. While this sounds like a good idea, but personas this broad can only include a high level data and it is this lack of specifics that may be good for general decision making but not very desirable for designing specific features or workflows. So, in the end, these personas are seen as unhelpful in practice.
Above - an example of what I call, a focus-less persona.
It is generally better to create personas with a more targeted scope of focus so that the data collected and the resulting personas can have a more direct influence on the designs the team intends to create.
With that said, it is important for any persona project to understand what stakeholders want to achieve with the personas before creating them.
Team members often have uncertainty about how personas can be used on a project. Not everybody is incredibly experienced in using personas, so rather than revealing them as posters or artefacts, I recommend help your colleagues understand the benefits of personas before making them. Give your stakeholders and idea of how to use the personas in a more practical sense.
Do not solo-create them! I have come across teams who work in silos make creating a persona, a 'researcher's problem'. Personas created singularly with no inputs from its users is not a user-centered practice in itself! Such personas can be incapable of communicating user empathy to the team and will fail to find a place in practice. People will always be sceptical of something if they do not know where it came from or how it was made. It is therefore stakeholders need to be involved in the making of personas so they what how research was done and how themes were derived from it. Teams will them be more invested in the personas when they are complete.
Like everything, personas age too. Everything changes and so do your customers. This change needs to be reflected in the personas the team uses. Research needs to be a part of BAU and new themes and insights need to make their way to personas–to refresh them. I created personas for a mid-large sized organisation in 2016 and I am aware that the team has since not invested any significant amount or resource in research practices. I am made to believe that the team continues to base its decisions on the now, almost 4 yr old personas. A lot remains to be said about this!
If you are someone who creates/uses personas and are finding it difficult to place them in your process, or are in the green-fields of persona creation for your team/organisation, use the points mentioned above a checklist and ensure you address these challenges as you go.
