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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 t
by 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 agoI 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 agoAs 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 agoI 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 agoit 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.
- dhimes 9y agoOK but this is a 30 minute exercise: whom are we building this for? I've seen talk about building personas where you try to specify all kinds of ancillary data about the personas: where they live, how many kids, etc. I would love to hear about a time where the persona development led to a new insight because it's a persona. Like: this person's a parent-> probably attends parent-teacher groups-> voila! needs XXXX
- ci5er 9y ago> I've seen talk about building personas where you try to specify all kinds of ancillary data about the personas: where they live, how many kids, etc. What is the stated justification there?
- dhimes 9y agoThe idea is supposedly to "get inside the heads" of the target user. This will lead presumably lead to some sort of intuition about what their needs are and how to market to them. TFA sheds no light on the unique advantages offered by detailed personas.
- ci5er 9y agoHmmm. My product has "this cluster of users" vs "that cluster of users". But we really don't attempt to imagine their home-life. Or race or sex or orientation. Just what they are into feature-set wise. EDIT: I think we call them "User-Type-A" and "User-Type-B". That doesn't sound very sexy - but it helps us prioritize feature development (esp. since "User-Type-B" never pays for anything - those features come last. But the non-paying user type is the most winge-ey - I've never figured out how that could be - but they are)
- king_magic 9y agoI’ll throw out another (admittedly anecdotal) issue - cost and effort to develop something that - in my experience - isn’t all that valuable in the end. In my life as a consultant I’ve watched a team of UX ‘experts’ churn for 2 weeks over a set of 5 personas. Jaw dropped every time we would check in - this is what you spent the last 3 days on? Even more stunning was the client’s reaction to the 3rd review of those personas. It was the same 1hr convo as the previous 2 reviews, and no one seemed to think this wasn’t a massive waste of time and their money. After the personas were done, no one ever referred back to them for the remainder of the project. It was one of the greatest ‘value minimization’ excersises I’ve seen in my career.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mistermann 9y agoReminds me of a RACI matrix experience.
- WaxProlix 9y agoRACI can at least be useful for defining who should be in what meetings early on, how communications should go out, and even CYA later on in the project. It can be good to have investment levels explicitly defined.
- mistermann 9y agoThere are probably plenty of places it's useful that I've just never been exposed to, but I bet for every one of those, there's two or more others using it who don't need it, but only because they were sold it by management consultants at a lean management training course or something like that.
- michaelrichards 9y agoI disagree. The concept of personas is useful for abstracting the user's previous experiences and habits formed, not their current goals. It's a useful abstraction that should be considered an abstraction and not a concrete example. When discussing 'stay at home moms', we're encapsulating the past experiences of such personas.
- harryf 9y agoI think therein lies the real reason why personas (often) fail - no one establishes the connection from the personas to the types of user / customer segments companies will have already established, from analysing their sales data and usage analytics. By contrast to something like A/B testing, which can produce actionable results, in my experience personas frequently end up as nothing more than MeetingWare, so that everyone attending "can be on the same page"
- ErikVandeWater 9y agoI think for some products this would actually be useful. Some products are inherently not exactly goal-oriented - Point A to Point B. Take Facebook for example. It's not about achieving the objective of putting photos online, it's about the mystery of being invited to a website to share who you are with your friends and learning how you can interact through this new medium. It really mattered that Facebook targeted a specific demographic. If they didn't target that demographic exclusively, they wouldn't have succeeded, because college student's mom's would have been on there and they would have felt vulnerable, and found somewhere else to share.
- jerf 9y agoYes, the very idea that customers can be bucketed is flawed. We are all unique people. But we do not categorize our customers into buckets because we are denying their individuality. We do it because we lack the cognitive firepower to address several thousand people individually, by multiple orders of magnitude. Categorization isn't a denial of their humanity, it's an acknowledgement of our humanity, as opposed to being some sort of post-Singularity AI or Deity that is capable of individually addressing people. We have no options to address this flaw. Pretending that we've just got one user who wants to routinely buy Depends, yet at others for no apparent reason, is intensely into punk rock, and on another day forgets how to speak English and is only going to interact with your site in Tagalog, is just going to distort your UI in other ways. I don't think acknowledging people's individuality is accomplished by only acknowledging one individual, with that individual constructed in such a way that this one individual is representative of nobody.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI think GP is fine with bucketing, but they're saying that f(age, gender, interests, ...) is not a good hashing function. I haven't seen studies on the topic, but on the surface of it, I'm inclined to agree - it doesn't seem to be a good bucketing strategy, and unless we're talking about cold-calling/edge of the funnel, and painting in very broad strokes, it misses the most important factor uniting them all - they're on your site, so they must want something. Hence, "we should use criteria based on what people are trying to achieve right now".
- crandycodes 9y agoPersona as a "mascot" for a scenario has been helpful for me. It helps to think through the idea from the user's point of view, not how the software wants to be written, so to speak. Having two personas for a scenario also helps to delineate a spectrum (i.e. a casual and pro user) when you're going to have users with different requirements going through the life cycle of your product.