Personas: The great misunderstanding

Reminder: What are personas ?

Personas were first described by Alan Cooper in his ground breaking book “The inmates are running the asylum”:

Our most effective tool is profoundly simple: Develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish.

He goes on to define personas as “hypothetical archetypes of actual users” and states that personas “are defined by their goals”.
One of the key points here is that personas are never made up but are grounded in research. They are used to provide condensed information about the result of the user research. Another take away is that a persona description should include its goals.

The misunderstanding

In recent times some designers dumped personas because they are 1) imaginary and 2) defined by attributes that leave out causality. The problem here is that personas are often seen as a collection of mere demographic data (like age, job, income, …). But this only describes marketing personas not the personas imagined by Alan Cooper. As seen in his books the data of a persona is never made up but inferred from user research. Also demographics play only a minor role in creating personas, citing Mr. Cooper again:

Personas are segmented along ranges of user behaviour, not demographics or buying behaviour.

So the behaviour of our users defines the persona not any demographic trait.

The causality mentioned in the criticism misses a vital part of a persona: the scenario. Personas go hand-in-hand with scenarios (by Alan Cooper, About Face):

Persona-based scenarios are concise narrative descriptions of one or more personas using a product or service to achieve specific goals.

and

Scenario content and context are derived from information gathered during the Research phase and analyzed during the Modeling phase

So with these scenarios personas describe the context and the goals and behaviours of our users.

As we see with the criticism the context, goals and motivations of our users are important. Personas and scenarios should not be made up but condensed from research. They are used to say ‘no’ to decisions in the process of designing. A word of warning: do not abstract your persona too far away from your users. One goal of personas are to built empathy. If your personas are too artificial your empathy will suffer. Also I like how Jeff Patton uses research findings: for him they are like vacation photos, if you’ve been there they are reminder what happened.

Consensus

The criticism largely comes from designers favoring the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) methodology. Jobs-to-be-done is a framework to analyse and describe why a users hires a product or service to get something done. It provides a very useful perspective on the context and behaviour of users. Both approaches (personas and jobs) can be combined. Where personas provide a human connection, jobs provide a contextual one. Shahrzad Samadzadeh provides a sketch how both can be combined with the help of a journey map. All three methods help to balance each approach: the personas help to avoid making the jobs too analytic, the jobs help to ground and limit the personas in research valuable to the problem at hand and journeys can bring all together.