The Problem with Personas
How to Make ’em, Use ’em, and Abuse ’em
Interaction designers have been employing the use of Personas as a design thinking tool since the 1980s, but they were not in wide use until Alan Cooper popularized them in 1999 in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Using them can be a valuable tool, but using them incorrectly can hinder exploration within design process.
Personas were created to help designers understand and think specifically for a small subset of users. By identifying individuals, designers were able to focus on the primary user and make design decisions that fit these individual profiles rather than trying to design for a broader audience. Personas promote user-centered design when our natural tendency is to be self-centered, users have varied needs and desires and personas can help explain their complexities, and act as a proxy with designers and stakeholders.
Over the last couple of decades there have been many different techniques to developing personas, but the objectives are the same, to conceive of a customer that your team can champion and understand how this person would interact with your product or service. I’m going to highlight a few of the different ways of developing personas below.
Techniques for Developing Personas
Cooperian Persona
Developed by Alan Cooper, where insights are found from collected research and quantitative and qualitative data and constructed into fictitious characters reflecting very specific goals. This tool fits into a part of Alan Cooper’s larger methodology, Goal-Directed Design. This is one of the most research-based way of identifying a persona, but a common critique of this method is that these personas can be unconvincing because they are composites of various interviewees and can seem both disjointed and unbelievable (referred to as the ‘Frankenstein’ effect).
Ad-Hoc Persona
Developed by Donald Norman and based on a designer’s own intuition and assumptions. Norman believes that personas should be used as a tool to help designers communicate and therefore did not need to be ‘real’, only realistic. These types of personas can be discovered by questioning the main stakeholders, leaders, and members of the design team about their perceptions of the primary users. The main purpose is to help expose misconceptions and varying ideas about the target users within the design team and stakeholders, but should be used with other methods to understand users.
I recently helped run a workshop where we did a cross-persona exercise. We had 5 different businesses in the workshop and each owner had to do a persona for another company based only on the company’s mission statement. The results were really interesting because the business owners had very set ideas in their minds on who their target customer is and they were very surprised on what the other other companies thought their target customer was.
Pastiche Persona
Mark Blythe and Peter Wright favor these personas, which are developed from existing fictional characters from television shows, books, and films (e.g. Ebeneezer Scrooge and Bridget Jones). They can open up new thinking and design insights, because the characters are richly complex and embedded culturally within society. The method of using Pastiche personas investigates and demonstrates some of the issues with using data-driven personas, by illustrating how rich characters can produce new insights on user needs and desires. This method should be used with caution because Winnie the Pooh is not really related to your target market, but could develop some interesting creative outputs.
Behavioral Personas
Another way of creating personas is to not base them on demographics, but rather on grouped goals, motivations, and behaviors. Taken from qualitative insights, they focus not on who the user is, but rather what they do and why they do it. This is more valuable, because characteristics and behaviors don’t necessarily align with one another. Goals can change throughout the journey of a product or service, so a person can fit into multiple Behavioral Personas. They are a better way of understanding the user by what they are trying to achieve, their hidden motivations, and their behavioral patterns. The design team then should be able to align their product or service journey with the user’s goals.
How We Use Them
So now that you have used on of the techniques to develop a persona, what do you do with him/ her/ Winnie the Pooh?
The key to utilizing a persona is understanding at what point during the different stages of the research and design process when you should be using your intuition. Personas can be used within the context of different design thinking tools, such as a customer journey map, a service blueprint, or within a storyboard. As interaction designers we often use stories as a way to understand how a customer interacts with a product or service, so this is where personas may come in handy.
Susan really hates going to the post office ,but needs to send in her tax forms. She drives there with her two kids in the backseat and needs to find a place to park the car. She finds a space after 10 minutes, parks, and takes her kids out of the car. She walks in the door to the post office, with each kid in one hand and sees 8 people in line so she walks over to the self service kiosk…
The goal is to step outside yourself as a designer and understand your product or service through your user’s eyes. However, you should try and think about the behavior and what need she is trying to fill. Is Susan in a rush? What is she doing there? What are the pain points in her journey?
The Problems with Personas
The biggest downfalls with using personas is not basing them on the right attributes from the start. They tend to focus on characteristics, and are often created with little insight into the behavior of the people they represent. This is why I recommend behavioral personas unless you have a strong persona based on many iterations and a large amount of data. However, even when based on a lot of qualitative and quantitative data your persona is likely to go from being a very flat version of a person to a very stereotypical version of a person.
You do not know your user just because you named her Susan.
The use of stereotyping has been widely documented throughout a variety of persona studies, which is why creating personas should be a supplementary design tool to other design techniques and user testing. Stereotypes including, cultural, gender, socioeconomic will often be used to explain predictable sets of behaviors and attitudes throughout each of these methods after personas are identified. Stereotypes hinder the design process and exploration by prejudicing our understanding of behaviors and reactions of generalizations of user groups.
In a recent workshop I ran there were three Ad-hoc personas created that were all women in their late 20s, all working in finance, and all dieting in preparation for their wedding or because they were worried about finding a relationship.
Personas can be a good way to help designers remember to put aside their own needs and behaviors and to think about the user’s needs and behaviors instead. However, they need to be supplemented with additional user testing and research.
