14 ms·

Why Personas Fail

182 points by adrian_mrd 9y ago

lmm 9y ago
Interesting how hardly any of this page is specific to "personas". Anything created without a clear intent to use it, or created in a silo and then imposed on the rest of the organisation, is likely to fail.
- ddebernardy 9y ago
  That's unfortunately how it's often done in orgs. It's not just large orgs, either. I've lost count of the number of startups I've interacted with that had barely if ever talked to their own users.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    It’s more fun to play what-if with your fellow devs. We like to blame everyone else for feature creep but we add plenty of our own too. That’s a big part of what personas are for. To get out of analysis paralysis, and stop adding features that add combinatirally to the complexity of the app.
    - ddebernardy 9y ago
      Heh, marketers play what if games too. The good ones just actually test their hypotheses (just like good devs).
- ivan_gammel 9y ago
  It still makes sense to remind, that UX processes are not exception here. Failures of classical software engineering may feel distant and even not applicable to an agile team focused on UX, so some good explanations on why this also happens in the UX domain, and maybe even as a part of their process, are helpful.
bambax 9y ago
In my former life as a consultant I came to very much dislike personas as implemented by ux designers. Personas are a magnet for prejudice: they are based on the idea that clusters of people all behave the same (old people, young people, professionals, stay-at-home mothers, what have you). This very idea is, I think, flawed. If we really need to sort people into groups, then we should use criteria based on what people are trying to achieve right now, not inherent characteristics that are supposed to influence/define their behavior all of the time. Therefore it would make more sense to have just one typical user, with different attitudes based on her -changing- goals.
- Angostura 9y ago
  I disagree. Where website have a variety of different potential types of user, it can be useful to explicitly describe those different types of users, their needs and goals. Calling them Bob or Mary, can just be useful shorthand and avoid segments getting forgotten about. In speccing and QA, I've always included a section on 'Works for Mary? Works for Bob?' etc. It's not rocket science and shouldn't be stupidly glossy in my opinion. But initial agreement can really help functional design.
  - pweissbrod 9y ago
    As I read it persona is more of an attempt at characterizing the mindset/psychology of the end user. Your description of persona is more like a user role serves as a grouping of use cases or user stories (which is still very useful!)
    - Angostura 9y ago
      I think the two are fairly closely linked. In my mind, each persona is essentially a group of user roles collected together and given a explanatory biography and a fake moustache
- michaelt 9y ago
  it would make more sense to have just one typical user, Some products have users with distinct - almost contradictory - requirements. For example, some spreadsheet users want simple graphs with big numbers that will look good in presentations, and a simple UI they can use on their phone. Other spreadsheet users want to make complex graphs with labelled arrows, thousands of points, multiple different graphs with aligned axes, and things like that. Multiple personas can be useful for expressing that fact - otherwise you're stuck saying the just-one-user wants things to be simple and complicated at the same time.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
OscarTheGrinch 9y ago
I've done a few sessions using personas and can see little benifit to justify the time expended upon them. If generated out of thin air rather than from actual users it's just an exercise in exploring the teams predudices rather than any external market needs.
- Angostura 9y ago
  Point 3 in the article: >In order for stakeholders to use personas, they have to believe in them, feel invested, and have ownership over them. The most successful personas are created with involvement from their end users. Otherwise, people will have no understanding of the data behind them and the rigor that went into creating them. Coworkers may think that the UX team just went away and played story time for a few weeks, emerging with these fake people and asking everybody to play along. That is NOT the attitude we want to foster. >To avoid this pitfall, you must include the persona end users in the process of creating personas. Invite stakeholders to sit in on a research session. Send out a daily recap of the activities undertaken to create the personas. Help people see how your research uncovers the customer segments early on, so that when you roll out the personas there is built-in investment in their validity and value.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    In order for stakeholders to use personas, they have to believe in them, feel invested, and have ownership over them. I've done this a few times and no matter how convinced I was it was, in the end, pure fantasy. The most successful personas are created with involvement from their end users. I don't know what they mean by success: I tried to use personas to understand customers I didn't have.
weego 9y ago
Personas are always just a projection of bias whether from the UX team or from stakeholders. They are absolutely a useful tool, but often abused. Too often I saw tickets written by product owners with stories like "As user type X I want to be able to do Y when I'm in this situation" where there was no empathy in correlating the actual functionality with anything to do with the persona and they literally just wanted that functionality in the system. Which is fine, but at that point admit your persona system is bullshit and you're just doing opinion lead development.
adrian_mrd 9y ago
Important to differentiate between personas as archetypes and those based on stereotypes. The difference? Solid, hard-yards user research that comes from a large enough sample set.
- virgilp 9y ago
  That's my understanding too. The useful way to do a persona is: 1. Find a (real!) user of your product, that you believe to be more-or-less an "archetype" of a class of similar users 2. Start writing down his(her) workflows/ how (s)he uses your app/what (s)he's trying to achieve, etc. AFAIK my company is even preserving the real first name of the "persona". If we're talking about real people, then it makes sense to use their behaviors/needs to guide the design of the product. If we're talking about imaginary people... well, you're just optimizing your product for some imaginary user :)
- dhimes 9y ago
  This seems like the right answer- I wish it was higher in the thread. Do you have a reliable reference? As I said in another thread I'd really like to see examples of insights that were arrived at due to the use of personas- at least where personas made getting that insight more efficient.
  - gav 9y ago
    One of my favorite examples of where personas really helped was driving both strategy and design for a wholesaler. Through research, one of the personas that fell out was "man with a van", that is a sole proprietor who did most of their work out of their van. Two key insights were: 1) The median age was higher, being in the 50s they were starting to thinking about the retirement and handing over the business. Even if they had little interest in engaging with digital, their protégé would, and ignoring digital would mean losing market share in the future. 2) They were on the road a lot, and mobile-based experiences would be helpful over having to call/fax orders, bills, etc. However research showed that their biggest complaint was the small size of UI elements for both reading, and more importantly clicking on (lots of complaints about how hard mobile website were to use with fat fingers). I hope this was useful; I find well developed personas useful to keep in mind the disparate users of a system, what they are trying to achieve, and how. There was a comment about validating personas as part of user stories, which I'd recommend.
natecavanaugh 9y ago
In my opinion, personas fail because it's literally profiling, which has limited use in identifying real world behavior. Who you "are" doesn't define what you do, so I think the activity model works better for UX work. Instead of maximizing a product for "Jim" from Marketing, optimize for what Jim needs to do and get done. Everything else is some sort of weird bias.
toss1 9y ago
While Personas may plausibly work as an aide for marketing program development (a convenient way to abstract audience preferences), it is fundamentally doomed as a useful UX design concept. Any product or software is a TOOL to get things done. The UI is the exposed interface to allow that work to be done, whether it is the deign of the handle on a hammer, or the menu/button/etc. structure. The good UI makes it obvious and easy to perform the actual task or tasks for which the tool is intended. A "Persona" is simply too vague a spec to provide guidance on how to design a more usable tool. What is needed is a clear concept of the tasks to be done, not some abstract set of demographic characteristics, motivations and attitudes.
- juliushuijnk 9y ago
  UI design is not the same as UX design, important difference and potentially a source of misunderstanding. If you are at the point that you know that a page with a certain purpose needs to be made, then the UI is often not that hard to design and you can make use of best practices, a/b testing, etc. But for UX design, you also need to figure out the "clear concept of the tasks to be done". Taking the perspective of the persona helps you define the list of tasks to be done. If a hammer is needed, a screwdriver or a phone (to call someone who can build things). All people in the creation process have an idea about who that user is and what their needs are, by making it explicit you make sure you are all on the same page building the same thing.
  - juliushuijnk 9y ago
    To add a metaphor; when you design a class, you could say 'all i need is to know the purpose of the class, the API is enough'. But how would you define the API if you don't have a deep understanding of what the higher level purpose is of the class? The architecture used, related classes, etc. Perhaps the class you want to work doesn't actually needs to be built at all because it will be never called! Same goes with UX, it's first about the knowing the purpose of the program, architecture, the content, how it's related, etc, then you try to define the classes ('pages') and their API's ('what needs to be done on the page'). Once you know that, often the class ('the UI') is probably easy to build. But you'll probably make a better class if you understand why it exists in the first place.
pure-awesome 9y ago
This reminds me of a scathing and hilarious blog post about personas from 2013, where I actually first came across the concept: https://qntm.org/personas https://qntm.org/personas
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  A golden quote by the author, from the comments section: > In the end, there is only one user story: "As a human being, I wish to breathe, drink, eat, procreate and accomplish other, more abstract tasks of my own choosing." (Emphasis mine.)
  - brango 9y ago
    > of my own choosing Billions of marketing dollars are spent influencing people to make them "choose correctly".
jkaljundi 9y ago
Their older article of matching personas with Jobs-to-Be-Done has always been a good one: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ So is Intercom's: https://blog.intercom.com/when-personas-fail-you/ https://blog.intercom.com/when-personas-fail-you/ It also depends where you use these. While personas are often low value in product design and UX (where JTBD can shine), in marketing and sales personas can be a big help (although even there, JTBD has strong role).
swanson 9y ago
The criticism that opened my eyes to the issues with Personas was this example from Alan Klement: > Why did Alan buy the Snickers candy bar? A. Alan is a thirty-five year old; has a degree in marketing; likes peanuts, chocolate, nougat, and caramel; loves Snickers, eats one every day; has an active lifestyle; drives a Honda; aims to retire from age 55 B. Satisfy his hunger --- My other insight was that many UX firms treat artifacts like Personas as the deliverable. It is something concrete to show the value of the time and money spent doing research. But it is a deliverable that has almost no value to improving the product. The point of doing user research is to improve the product, not to produce a beautiful 20 page "research document". But translating user research from interview into fully-realized and delivered features is hard, and emailing a PDF of personas is comparably much easier.
- astral303 9y ago
  if one were to read the motivating factors behind personas as described in “the inmates are running the asylum”, one would never come up with A. If one were to follow agile in principle (do; evaluate; improve what hurts; repeat), one would not end up with capital-A Agile Industry prescribing process by the book. This sounds like the same reason people avoided C++: after seeing lots of unnecessary complex C++ just for the sake of being “object-oriented” but entirely missing the point, who’d think it’s possible to write clearer code in C++?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Maybe it's because people aren't being introduced to personas in the proper context, with examples of proper usage? Personally, I've seen the concept in some software books and articles, but didn't really make use of it because my impression was that they want you to produce answers like the example A here, and then to magically divine some insights out of them.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Yeah. I think one of the deep problems is that people don't know why they're doing something (or refuse to admit it to themselves). A lot of the very early Agile adopters were there because they sincerely wanted to make better software. They were willing to be bold and do a lot of hard work. But after them came all the people who thought the wanted to make better software. The ones who wanted to feel bold and have the appearance of change without doing much work. Those people were ripe for the sorts of consultants and books and certifications that promised the moon while letting them slap Agile decals on the dumb stuff they were already doing. And what they were already doing was a lot of top-down nonsense that helped powerful people feel powerful. "Yes, Mr. Executive! This will deliver the exact thing you wanted! And it will be precisely on time, for whatever you mean by 'on time'! And have no defects!" It was nonsense, of course. But it let people pretend to be doing what they wanted to think of themselves doing, while also letting them actually do what they really wanted to do.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
Similarly, I hate it when vendors organize their site according to what they expect their customer's line of business to be, rather than the features that actually distinguish their own product or service lines. For example, AppliedMicro divides its products page into "data center", "carrier", and "embedded". So instead of browsing (or - dare I dream? - parametrically filtering) the product lines to find something with the features I need, I have to decide which hat I'm supposed to be wearing to be sold the right thing.
- donatj 9y ago
  Yes. I particularly hate when I am in none of the categories yet want the product or service. Makes me feel like they have no interest in selling to me right off the bat.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > when I am in none of the categories Or, equally annoying - when you're in more than one at the same time.
- valine 9y ago
  Dell is guilty of this sort of thing. Trying to price compare between “business” and “home” computers is a nightmare.
  - Stephen304 9y ago
    I experienced this just yesterday, I'm pretty sure it was exacerbated by a website bug, but selecting "All Laptops" took me to just Home laptops, where the XPS line couldn't be found at all. I ended up forgoing trying to compare all their lines and just selected the XPS section directly.
- gk1 9y ago
  Because they're selling outcomes, not features.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
djklanac 9y ago
Why not create profiles of real customer contacts? Use their own words for how they describe themselves and their goals.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  That would require real effort instead of storytelling during work hours. Whoch is harsh, but that’s the point. You are going to get far more insight from real customers than you are from one relatively homogenous sub-department’s imaginary beliefs about who your customers might be. IMO the latter is pretty much the definition of one of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs. http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/ http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...
  - megaman22 9y ago
    There's nothing more valuable than watching customers actually use a product. Almost never will they do it the way you expect, and absolutely never will they want to do it the way that the designer intended. Nothing points out a painful, complicated, broken, confusing UI as quickly.
- ivan_gammel 9y ago
  It may make sense, when you have 10 users, but then you can just skip profiling (and, by the way, profiling real users, at least in EU, is strictly limited from legal perspective - it just doesn't worth it). When there are thousands of users, real customer contacts may create unnecessary bias. There's no "average" real person, which means that serving the needs of one real person, you may hurt others too much. Personas are synthetic profiles for a reason: they cover the whole audience of the project or feature.
_pmf_ 9y ago
At best, it's something that arises organically from requirement elicitation without involving a UX team. At worst, it's completely off the mark.
snowwrestler 9y ago
Although this article talks about them from the perspective of UX, personae are fundamentally a marketing concept. They are simply a handy abstraction to help non-experts reason consistently about market segments. This is like using the idea of "selfish genes" to help people reason consistently about natural selection. We don't think that genes are actually selfish, any more than we think that all customers fit into a few neat buckets. It just tricks the mind into adopting a different perspective. It matters for product UX because your product will only serve the people who experience it, and people will only experience your product if you market it to them. (This is often where developers, who tend to look down on marketing and PR, fall off this wagon. But it is largely true.) If you want a basic concrete example of the value of personae, then compare the bathrooms at an elementary school vs a bar. You're not going to position the fixtures the same way in both. But in order to reason about that, you need to first know who is coming into the respective establishments, and why.
- shostack 9y ago
  As a marketing person, I can confirm that they can often be a useful abstraction, particularly when collaborating with people who need to get the general direction of an audience, but aren't necessarily data nerds who need to be intimately familiar with the detailed demographics, psychographics, technographics, behavioral data, etc. They absolutely have limitations and can overly simplify things to a fault sometimes, but as long as everyone gets that it is a representation and not the absolute, they can help streamline things.
perseusprime11 9y ago
Here's an interesting counter point: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/
ravenstine 9y ago
The article mostly suggests that personas are just done wrong, and that's why they fail. Has this method ever actually been proven to increase success? In my experience, they always end up being hideous stereotypes that nobody takes seriously(for good reason).
ThomPete 9y ago
Personas are primarily a mapping tool for providing the team with a library of potential users, their background and needs with relation to your product and to which the team can design up against. They fail (at being useful) because they often have very little to do with the actual user's situations. A better way IMO is to use customer support to figure out who your users actually are or go and speak with your users and learn what they actually want. We never recommend doing them unless a project needs a lot of documentation for a lot of switching hands and you are worried that some of the insights might be lost on new team members. As a design tool they aren't really that helpful for anything.
mirimir 9y ago
Not what I was expecting. I love my personas. Most of them, anyway. Especially Mirimir. Some of them are not so nice. But hey.
- draw_down 9y ago
  Shhhhhh.
anthonyshort 9y ago
I feel like I need to point out that in my experience demographic personas like this aren't used by product designers. I've seen marketing use them. Not designers. Designers often get associated with fluffy exercises so I want to kill that stereotype. I don't think I've ever worked on a product team that used demographic personas like these.
bayonetz 9y ago
A lot of straw manning in this thread. Personas can be a very useful way to characterize your product's users. There are other ways as well. Each have their pros and cons. Personas are great for deriving a small covering set of concrete user types that can be used to guide and sanity check your design choices. It allows you to gather a bunch of user requirement info once and package it in a reusable way such that you don't have to do new research for every new design choice that pops up. Have a new new design question about user needs or motivations? Consult your personas. If the personas don't answer the question? Do some additional research and expand your personas. Personas not the right fit for the question? No problem, use another tool like classic functional user requirements for this question. Personas for food ordering apps demonstrate the usefulness nicely. You want to know the preferences that segment your users like restaurant quality, cost, and healthy options as well as demographics like age and income. From this you can derive a few clusters, and ultimately personas. Useful ones like "Jeff, the young workaholic that needs dinner brought to the office each night" or "Tom and Sarah, parents trying to find decently healthy takeout options for their kids". Now you can ask questions like, "do we have enough healthy options that Tom and Sarah's kids will like?" and "do we have an easy way for Jeff to reorder weeknight meals? Do we need a subscription plan?" You can do similar things with other user research tools but personas are very natural and intuitive for many scenarios.
eurticket 9y ago
Funny title that everyone reads and goes on with their comments. The article was saying Personas in their current form fail. Mainly, because the companies that design professionals use them for are not being utilized together with the clients involvement. They aren't being translate throughout the entire design process, they are for understanding design reasoning, instead of always bringing up random things a customer may need, they are compacted into easy to id personas, and that is what they are for. Simple recall, for clients and designers to have a common vocabulary to talk about who we are solving problems for.

182 points by adrian_mrd 9y ago

lmm 9y ago

Interesting how hardly any of this page is specific to "personas". Anything created without a clear intent to use it, or created in a silo and then imposed on the rest of the organisation, is likely to fail.

ddebernardy 9y ago
That's unfortunately how it's often done in orgs. It's not just large orgs, either. I've lost count of the number of startups I've interacted with that had barely if ever talked to their own users.
- hinkley 9y ago
  It’s more fun to play what-if with your fellow devs. We like to blame everyone else for feature creep but we add plenty of our own too. That’s a big part of what personas are for. To get out of analysis paralysis, and stop adding features that add combinatirally to the complexity of the app.
  - ddebernardy 9y ago
    Heh, marketers play what if games too. The good ones just actually test their hypotheses (just like good devs).
ivan_gammel 9y ago
It still makes sense to remind, that UX processes are not exception here. Failures of classical software engineering may feel distant and even not applicable to an agile team focused on UX, so some good explanations on why this also happens in the UX domain, and maybe even as a part of their process, are helpful.

bambax 9y ago

In my former life as a consultant I came to very much dislike personas as implemented by ux designers. Personas are a magnet for prejudice: they are based on the idea that clusters of people all behave the same (old people, young people, professionals, stay-at-home mothers, what have you). This very idea is, I think, flawed. If we really need to sort people into groups, then we should use criteria based on what people are trying to achieve right now, not inherent characteristics that are supposed to influence/define their behavior all of the time. Therefore it would make more sense to have just one typical user, with different attitudes based on her -changing- goals.

Angostura 9y ago
I disagree. Where website have a variety of different potential types of user, it can be useful to explicitly describe those different types of users, their needs and goals. Calling them Bob or Mary, can just be useful shorthand and avoid segments getting forgotten about. In speccing and QA, I've always included a section on 'Works for Mary? Works for Bob?' etc. It's not rocket science and shouldn't be stupidly glossy in my opinion. But initial agreement can really help functional design.
- pweissbrod 9y ago
  As I read it persona is more of an attempt at characterizing the mindset/psychology of the end user. Your description of persona is more like a user role serves as a grouping of use cases or user stories (which is still very useful!)
  - Angostura 9y ago
    I think the two are fairly closely linked. In my mind, each persona is essentially a group of user roles collected together and given a explanatory biography and a fake moustache
michaelt 9y ago
it would make more sense to have just one typical user, Some products have users with distinct - almost contradictory - requirements. For example, some spreadsheet users want simple graphs with big numbers that will look good in presentations, and a simple UI they can use on their phone. Other spreadsheet users want to make complex graphs with labelled arrows, thousands of points, multiple different graphs with aligned axes, and things like that. Multiple personas can be useful for expressing that fact - otherwise you're stuck saying the just-one-user wants things to be simple and complicated at the same time.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

OscarTheGrinch 9y ago

I've done a few sessions using personas and can see little benifit to justify the time expended upon them. If generated out of thin air rather than from actual users it's just an exercise in exploring the teams predudices rather than any external market needs.

Angostura 9y ago
Point 3 in the article: >In order for stakeholders to use personas, they have to believe in them, feel invested, and have ownership over them. The most successful personas are created with involvement from their end users. Otherwise, people will have no understanding of the data behind them and the rigor that went into creating them. Coworkers may think that the UX team just went away and played story time for a few weeks, emerging with these fake people and asking everybody to play along. That is NOT the attitude we want to foster. >To avoid this pitfall, you must include the persona end users in the process of creating personas. Invite stakeholders to sit in on a research session. Send out a daily recap of the activities undertaken to create the personas. Help people see how your research uncovers the customer segments early on, so that when you roll out the personas there is built-in investment in their validity and value.
- dhimes 9y ago
  In order for stakeholders to use personas, they have to believe in them, feel invested, and have ownership over them. I've done this a few times and no matter how convinced I was it was, in the end, pure fantasy. The most successful personas are created with involvement from their end users. I don't know what they mean by success: I tried to use personas to understand customers I didn't have.

weego 9y ago

Personas are always just a projection of bias whether from the UX team or from stakeholders. They are absolutely a useful tool, but often abused. Too often I saw tickets written by product owners with stories like "As user type X I want to be able to do Y when I'm in this situation" where there was no empathy in correlating the actual functionality with anything to do with the persona and they literally just wanted that functionality in the system. Which is fine, but at that point admit your persona system is bullshit and you're just doing opinion lead development.

adrian_mrd 9y ago

Important to differentiate between personas as archetypes and those based on stereotypes. The difference? Solid, hard-yards user research that comes from a large enough sample set.

virgilp 9y ago
That's my understanding too. The useful way to do a persona is: 1. Find a (real!) user of your product, that you believe to be more-or-less an "archetype" of a class of similar users 2. Start writing down his(her) workflows/ how (s)he uses your app/what (s)he's trying to achieve, etc. AFAIK my company is even preserving the real first name of the "persona". If we're talking about real people, then it makes sense to use their behaviors/needs to guide the design of the product. If we're talking about imaginary people... well, you're just optimizing your product for some imaginary user :)
dhimes 9y ago
This seems like the right answer- I wish it was higher in the thread. Do you have a reliable reference? As I said in another thread I'd really like to see examples of insights that were arrived at due to the use of personas- at least where personas made getting that insight more efficient.
- gav 9y ago
  One of my favorite examples of where personas really helped was driving both strategy and design for a wholesaler. Through research, one of the personas that fell out was "man with a van", that is a sole proprietor who did most of their work out of their van. Two key insights were: 1) The median age was higher, being in the 50s they were starting to thinking about the retirement and handing over the business. Even if they had little interest in engaging with digital, their protégé would, and ignoring digital would mean losing market share in the future. 2) They were on the road a lot, and mobile-based experiences would be helpful over having to call/fax orders, bills, etc. However research showed that their biggest complaint was the small size of UI elements for both reading, and more importantly clicking on (lots of complaints about how hard mobile website were to use with fat fingers). I hope this was useful; I find well developed personas useful to keep in mind the disparate users of a system, what they are trying to achieve, and how. There was a comment about validating personas as part of user stories, which I'd recommend.

natecavanaugh 9y ago

In my opinion, personas fail because it's literally profiling, which has limited use in identifying real world behavior. Who you "are" doesn't define what you do, so I think the activity model works better for UX work. Instead of maximizing a product for "Jim" from Marketing, optimize for what Jim needs to do and get done. Everything else is some sort of weird bias.

toss1 9y ago

While Personas may plausibly work as an aide for marketing program development (a convenient way to abstract audience preferences), it is fundamentally doomed as a useful UX design concept. Any product or software is a TOOL to get things done. The UI is the exposed interface to allow that work to be done, whether it is the deign of the handle on a hammer, or the menu/button/etc. structure. The good UI makes it obvious and easy to perform the actual task or tasks for which the tool is intended. A "Persona" is simply too vague a spec to provide guidance on how to design a more usable tool. What is needed is a clear concept of the tasks to be done, not some abstract set of demographic characteristics, motivations and attitudes.

juliushuijnk 9y ago
UI design is not the same as UX design, important difference and potentially a source of misunderstanding. If you are at the point that you know that a page with a certain purpose needs to be made, then the UI is often not that hard to design and you can make use of best practices, a/b testing, etc. But for UX design, you also need to figure out the "clear concept of the tasks to be done". Taking the perspective of the persona helps you define the list of tasks to be done. If a hammer is needed, a screwdriver or a phone (to call someone who can build things). All people in the creation process have an idea about who that user is and what their needs are, by making it explicit you make sure you are all on the same page building the same thing.
- juliushuijnk 9y ago
  To add a metaphor; when you design a class, you could say 'all i need is to know the purpose of the class, the API is enough'. But how would you define the API if you don't have a deep understanding of what the higher level purpose is of the class? The architecture used, related classes, etc. Perhaps the class you want to work doesn't actually needs to be built at all because it will be never called! Same goes with UX, it's first about the knowing the purpose of the program, architecture, the content, how it's related, etc, then you try to define the classes ('pages') and their API's ('what needs to be done on the page'). Once you know that, often the class ('the UI') is probably easy to build. But you'll probably make a better class if you understand why it exists in the first place.

pure-awesome 9y ago

This reminds me of a scathing and hilarious blog post about personas from 2013, where I actually first came across the concept: https://qntm.org/personas https://qntm.org/personas

TeMPOraL 9y ago
A golden quote by the author, from the comments section: > In the end, there is only one user story: "As a human being, I wish to breathe, drink, eat, procreate and accomplish other, more abstract tasks of my own choosing." (Emphasis mine.)
- brango 9y ago
  > of my own choosing Billions of marketing dollars are spent influencing people to make them "choose correctly".

jkaljundi 9y ago

Their older article of matching personas with Jobs-to-Be-Done has always been a good one: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ So is Intercom's: https://blog.intercom.com/when-personas-fail-you/ https://blog.intercom.com/when-personas-fail-you/ It also depends where you use these. While personas are often low value in product design and UX (where JTBD can shine), in marketing and sales personas can be a big help (although even there, JTBD has strong role).

swanson 9y ago

The criticism that opened my eyes to the issues with Personas was this example from Alan Klement: > Why did Alan buy the Snickers candy bar? A. Alan is a thirty-five year old; has a degree in marketing; likes peanuts, chocolate, nougat, and caramel; loves Snickers, eats one every day; has an active lifestyle; drives a Honda; aims to retire from age 55 B. Satisfy his hunger --- My other insight was that many UX firms treat artifacts like Personas as the deliverable. It is something concrete to show the value of the time and money spent doing research. But it is a deliverable that has almost no value to improving the product. The point of doing user research is to improve the product, not to produce a beautiful 20 page "research document". But translating user research from interview into fully-realized and delivered features is hard, and emailing a PDF of personas is comparably much easier.

astral303 9y ago
if one were to read the motivating factors behind personas as described in “the inmates are running the asylum”, one would never come up with A. If one were to follow agile in principle (do; evaluate; improve what hurts; repeat), one would not end up with capital-A Agile Industry prescribing process by the book. This sounds like the same reason people avoided C++: after seeing lots of unnecessary complex C++ just for the sake of being “object-oriented” but entirely missing the point, who’d think it’s possible to write clearer code in C++?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Maybe it's because people aren't being introduced to personas in the proper context, with examples of proper usage? Personally, I've seen the concept in some software books and articles, but didn't really make use of it because my impression was that they want you to produce answers like the example A here, and then to magically divine some insights out of them.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Yeah. I think one of the deep problems is that people don't know why they're doing something (or refuse to admit it to themselves). A lot of the very early Agile adopters were there because they sincerely wanted to make better software. They were willing to be bold and do a lot of hard work. But after them came all the people who thought the wanted to make better software. The ones who wanted to feel bold and have the appearance of change without doing much work. Those people were ripe for the sorts of consultants and books and certifications that promised the moon while letting them slap Agile decals on the dumb stuff they were already doing. And what they were already doing was a lot of top-down nonsense that helped powerful people feel powerful. "Yes, Mr. Executive! This will deliver the exact thing you wanted! And it will be precisely on time, for whatever you mean by 'on time'! And have no defects!" It was nonsense, of course. But it let people pretend to be doing what they wanted to think of themselves doing, while also letting them actually do what they really wanted to do.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

Similarly, I hate it when vendors organize their site according to what they expect their customer's line of business to be, rather than the features that actually distinguish their own product or service lines. For example, AppliedMicro divides its products page into "data center", "carrier", and "embedded". So instead of browsing (or - dare I dream? - parametrically filtering) the product lines to find something with the features I need, I have to decide which hat I'm supposed to be wearing to be sold the right thing.

donatj 9y ago
Yes. I particularly hate when I am in none of the categories yet want the product or service. Makes me feel like they have no interest in selling to me right off the bat.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > when I am in none of the categories Or, equally annoying - when you're in more than one at the same time.
valine 9y ago
Dell is guilty of this sort of thing. Trying to price compare between “business” and “home” computers is a nightmare.
- Stephen304 9y ago
  I experienced this just yesterday, I'm pretty sure it was exacerbated by a website bug, but selecting "All Laptops" took me to just Home laptops, where the XPS line couldn't be found at all. I ended up forgoing trying to compare all their lines and just selected the XPS section directly.
gk1 9y ago
Because they're selling outcomes, not features.
snowwrestler 9y ago

djklanac 9y ago

Why not create profiles of real customer contacts? Use their own words for how they describe themselves and their goals.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
That would require real effort instead of storytelling during work hours. Whoch is harsh, but that’s the point. You are going to get far more insight from real customers than you are from one relatively homogenous sub-department’s imaginary beliefs about who your customers might be. IMO the latter is pretty much the definition of one of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs. http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/ http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...
- megaman22 9y ago
  There's nothing more valuable than watching customers actually use a product. Almost never will they do it the way you expect, and absolutely never will they want to do it the way that the designer intended. Nothing points out a painful, complicated, broken, confusing UI as quickly.
ivan_gammel 9y ago
It may make sense, when you have 10 users, but then you can just skip profiling (and, by the way, profiling real users, at least in EU, is strictly limited from legal perspective - it just doesn't worth it). When there are thousands of users, real customer contacts may create unnecessary bias. There's no "average" real person, which means that serving the needs of one real person, you may hurt others too much. Personas are synthetic profiles for a reason: they cover the whole audience of the project or feature.

_pmf_ 9y ago

At best, it's something that arises organically from requirement elicitation without involving a UX team. At worst, it's completely off the mark.

snowwrestler 9y ago

Although this article talks about them from the perspective of UX, personae are fundamentally a marketing concept. They are simply a handy abstraction to help non-experts reason consistently about market segments. This is like using the idea of "selfish genes" to help people reason consistently about natural selection. We don't think that genes are actually selfish, any more than we think that all customers fit into a few neat buckets. It just tricks the mind into adopting a different perspective. It matters for product UX because your product will only serve the people who experience it, and people will only experience your product if you market it to them. (This is often where developers, who tend to look down on marketing and PR, fall off this wagon. But it is largely true.) If you want a basic concrete example of the value of personae, then compare the bathrooms at an elementary school vs a bar. You're not going to position the fixtures the same way in both. But in order to reason about that, you need to first know who is coming into the respective establishments, and why.

shostack 9y ago
As a marketing person, I can confirm that they can often be a useful abstraction, particularly when collaborating with people who need to get the general direction of an audience, but aren't necessarily data nerds who need to be intimately familiar with the detailed demographics, psychographics, technographics, behavioral data, etc. They absolutely have limitations and can overly simplify things to a fault sometimes, but as long as everyone gets that it is a representation and not the absolute, they can help streamline things.

perseusprime11 9y ago

Here's an interesting counter point: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/

ravenstine 9y ago

The article mostly suggests that personas are just done wrong, and that's why they fail. Has this method ever actually been proven to increase success? In my experience, they always end up being hideous stereotypes that nobody takes seriously(for good reason).

ThomPete 9y ago

Personas are primarily a mapping tool for providing the team with a library of potential users, their background and needs with relation to your product and to which the team can design up against. They fail (at being useful) because they often have very little to do with the actual user's situations. A better way IMO is to use customer support to figure out who your users actually are or go and speak with your users and learn what they actually want. We never recommend doing them unless a project needs a lot of documentation for a lot of switching hands and you are worried that some of the insights might be lost on new team members. As a design tool they aren't really that helpful for anything.

mirimir 9y ago

Not what I was expecting. I love my personas. Most of them, anyway. Especially Mirimir. Some of them are not so nice. But hey.

draw_down 9y ago
Shhhhhh.

anthonyshort 9y ago

I feel like I need to point out that in my experience demographic personas like this aren't used by product designers. I've seen marketing use them. Not designers. Designers often get associated with fluffy exercises so I want to kill that stereotype. I don't think I've ever worked on a product team that used demographic personas like these.

bayonetz 9y ago

A lot of straw manning in this thread. Personas can be a very useful way to characterize your product's users. There are other ways as well. Each have their pros and cons. Personas are great for deriving a small covering set of concrete user types that can be used to guide and sanity check your design choices. It allows you to gather a bunch of user requirement info once and package it in a reusable way such that you don't have to do new research for every new design choice that pops up. Have a new new design question about user needs or motivations? Consult your personas. If the personas don't answer the question? Do some additional research and expand your personas. Personas not the right fit for the question? No problem, use another tool like classic functional user requirements for this question. Personas for food ordering apps demonstrate the usefulness nicely. You want to know the preferences that segment your users like restaurant quality, cost, and healthy options as well as demographics like age and income. From this you can derive a few clusters, and ultimately personas. Useful ones like "Jeff, the young workaholic that needs dinner brought to the office each night" or "Tom and Sarah, parents trying to find decently healthy takeout options for their kids". Now you can ask questions like, "do we have enough healthy options that Tom and Sarah's kids will like?" and "do we have an easy way for Jeff to reorder weeknight meals? Do we need a subscription plan?" You can do similar things with other user research tools but personas are very natural and intuitive for many scenarios.

eurticket 9y ago

Funny title that everyone reads and goes on with their comments. The article was saying Personas in their current form fail. Mainly, because the companies that design professionals use them for are not being utilized together with the clients involvement. They aren't being translate throughout the entire design process, they are for understanding design reasoning, instead of always bringing up random things a customer may need, they are compacted into easy to id personas, and that is what they are for. Simple recall, for clients and designers to have a common vocabulary to talk about who we are solving problems for.