4 ms·

I don't get these fake persona things I see in portfolios and on Behance and stuff. Are these a legit thing or just something that is taught in school so studen

I don't get these fake persona things I see in portfolios and on Behance and stuff. Are these a legit thing or just something that is taught in school so students do and put on their portfolio but isn't used in practice. I get the basic idea behind it but a lot of the time it comes off as quite pretentious, or filler work.

WillPostForFood 6y ago
I think they are a symptom of an underlying problem: building a product not for yourself, but for some imagined customer and need. It puts your product in peril because it adds guesswork. But if you have to do it, personas at least challenge you to put yourself in someone else's mindset.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I have seen the persona thing everywhere from startup accelerators to books on effective pitching as a consultant. It is a useful sales tool as then the people people management types who can easily relate to the persona.
GuiA 6y ago
They’re a bit like the UML diagrams of design. They have some utility in certain contexts but they are taught as a ready made solution without that context to students who aren’t able to relate it to real experience and end up overdoing it and misapplying it as they tend to do. It doesn’t hurt that doing it makes you feel like you’re doing something useful, it gives you a shiny deliverable, ... but in the end there likely are better ways to answer the kind of questions you really want to answer, and many of them involve making the actual thing vs making things that only serve the planning of the making of the thing.
pcurve 6y ago
Not just persona. There's journey mapping, storymapping, design thinking, storybrand exercise, designops, formative/summative/ generative research, ethnographic study, service design, heuristics, lean ux, contextual inquiry. I'm not saying these are all useless, but many are just old things re-packaged. And I've noticed that UX people are rarely challenged by other stakeholders because no one can possibly keep up with what any of these mean. It's part FUD and part obfuscation. If you you have good handle on who your customer base is (current and target), then no, you don't need personas. Just use real data. Where I become dumbfounded is when large companies with mountains of customer data with complicated segmentation and profiles continue to rely on just 5-6 same personas.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  Worked at a company where they decided to have a consultant design firm do the designs. 20 designers and 3 coders to do the actual things. The money dried up really fast (they where extremely expensive) and the design just sucked but boy did they have meetings like nobodies business.

WillPostForFood 6y ago

I think they are a symptom of an underlying problem: building a product not for yourself, but for some imagined customer and need. It puts your product in peril because it adds guesswork. But if you have to do it, personas at least challenge you to put yourself in someone else's mindset.

MattGaiser 6y ago

I have seen the persona thing everywhere from startup accelerators to books on effective pitching as a consultant. It is a useful sales tool as then the people people management types who can easily relate to the persona.

GuiA 6y ago

They’re a bit like the UML diagrams of design. They have some utility in certain contexts but they are taught as a ready made solution without that context to students who aren’t able to relate it to real experience and end up overdoing it and misapplying it as they tend to do. It doesn’t hurt that doing it makes you feel like you’re doing something useful, it gives you a shiny deliverable, ... but in the end there likely are better ways to answer the kind of questions you really want to answer, and many of them involve making the actual thing vs making things that only serve the planning of the making of the thing.

pcurve 6y ago

Not just persona. There's journey mapping, storymapping, design thinking, storybrand exercise, designops, formative/summative/ generative research, ethnographic study, service design, heuristics, lean ux, contextual inquiry. I'm not saying these are all useless, but many are just old things re-packaged. And I've noticed that UX people are rarely challenged by other stakeholders because no one can possibly keep up with what any of these mean. It's part FUD and part obfuscation. If you you have good handle on who your customer base is (current and target), then no, you don't need personas. Just use real data. Where I become dumbfounded is when large companies with mountains of customer data with complicated segmentation and profiles continue to rely on just 5-6 same personas.

danielscrubs 6y ago
Worked at a company where they decided to have a consultant design firm do the designs. 20 designers and 3 coders to do the actual things. The money dried up really fast (they where extremely expensive) and the design just sucked but boy did they have meetings like nobodies business.