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Personas is a business fad I'm skeptical about. They can often be little more than stereotypes, and they often make the "high dimensional orange" mistake. You
by vintermann 4y ago
Personas is a business fad I'm skeptical about. They can often be little more than stereotypes, and they often make the "high dimensional orange" mistake.
You imagine your persona has various attributes, of course. Like political preference, religiousness, age, income, melanin level, love of dark chocolate, love of Grateful Dead, you name it. And a lot of these are probably strongly correlated.
But if you normalize these attributes according to how much they vary, say on a scale from -1 to 1, then the average person is 0 on everything. But that person is vanishingly unlikely. So is the person who "follows all the stereotypes" and is a straight 1. Most people will lie on a "shell" at a specific distance from 0. That's the high dimensional orange: most of its volume is in the rind.
Your users/customers will feel pigeonholed when you assume that just because you like Grateful Dead, you'll like Santana. Or that just because you voted for Trump, you must love Prager U. Or that just because you've got high melanin, you like basketball. You get the picture, it's very easy to start annoying people with your "persona" assumptions.
- azangru 4y agoCould you apply your criticism to Gitlab personas in the link above? I am not sure I am following how politics, religiousness, age, melanin level, love of chocolate, etc. etc. could be relevant in that example.
- makeitdouble 4y agoThe “Sasha” engineer persona’s frustrations part: > I’m frustrated when requirements change after work has already begun on a project. > I’m frustrated when work is inaccurately scoped, because it causes stress and eats into time planned for other work. > I’m frustrated when I come across brittle code and something that should be an easy fix requires a lot of rework. > I’m concerned that by taking longer than expected on a task I may be judged or seen as blocking others’ work. This feels like a very rigid and grumpy personality, pretty unidimensional with the the “serious business” knob turned to 11. That is I think the ‘"follows all the stereotypes" and is a straight 1.’ phenomenon parent is referring to.
- vintermann 4y agoPersonas come from the sales and marketing world. They're not as damaging in development when they're little more than user stories with a name - but neither then are they very useful.
- glutamate 4y ago"Jobs to be done" are thought by some to be a better way of thinking about your product users than personas. https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done https://www.springboard.com/blog/design/user-personas-vs-jtbd/ https://www.springboard.com/blog/design/user-personas-vs-jtb...
- glcheetham 4y agoWhat is the "high dimensional orange" mistake
- dmitriid 4y agoWhat you've described is how Personas are used incorrectly. Personas are a good way to have an overview of how people use a complex product. It's basically categories and metrics, but high level and coarse. For example, for a streaming service you may have people who don't care about ads or audio and video quality because all they do is have something in the background while they cook, or drive the car. That's Persona A. And you have people who carefully curate their content, look for uncut gems, and have extensive music and film catalogs. That's Persona B. And then you try to look at your product from both perspectives. And then you either try to reconcile the two, or select one of them to cater to (backed up, by stats and data). However I agree that in many cases it's just a business fad