For the first nine years of my professional UX career, I created zero personas. In this time, I worked on over a dozen applications/systems, many of which were received enthusiastically by end users. Several of these were developed and fielded. This may seem shocking to many, since personas are a central piece to most UX processes and are often seen as essential to creating successful systems. It’s not that I (or anyone else in my company) hadn’t heard of personas, but they didn’t fit into our design process.
When I transitioned employers for the first time in my life I began to finally utilize this UX tool. I would love to say that using personas became a transformational experience - that the products I worked on became exponentially better. But this was not the case. I realized no difference. While product owners loved what I was producing and the designs tested well with end users, this response was similar to what I witnessed before.
After some time of this, I began to think that personas were kind of useless. I started creating personas out of habit to show customers, and then I would basically toss them aside. I would not bring up the persona in design meetings, nor would I use the persona as justification with customers. They existed because they were part of our process. No more, no less. Still, the designs did not suffer.
After a few months of this, I began to do some self-reflection and review. I talked it over with some of my fellow designers. Through all this, I came to a happy understanding with the place of personas in the design process. I arrived at the following conclusions:
Are Personas Critical? No!
Are Personas Useless? No!
Although this seems like a contradiction at first glance, I think this is an important insight.
Alan Cooper is regarded as the father of using Personas in application design. He explains the origins in a post here. This filled a vital need in the product development process. Whereas most applications had been designed using broad, implicit assumptions about the users prior to this (if any were considered at all), the persona laid bare the actual user research and assumptions to be considered during design. This included the user goals and motivations (among other things) for the work the users are trying to do.
This is incredibly important and a crucial step in driving towards the consideration of the user experience. The persona is a wonderful tool to capture user research insights in a simple, direct, engageable manner. The user had a constant presence in the room – on the team even.
So what’s changed that made personas less than essential? Nothing. The key is to remember that the persona is a tool that we have at our disposal. Like all tools, it is made for certain tasks, and sometimes other tools come along that can do that job as well or better, or might be suited to a slightly different task. This doesn’t make personas useless - they are one more tool in the kit.
The persona itself isn’t of great importance, though having a ‘person’ to refer to and talk about can help. What’s valuable is the information that it conveys. The persona is intended as a repository of all the knowledge gained about your users during research that might be useful for the final product. There are several ways to capture this information, of which personas are just 1. Even as my personas became perfunctory, I still prepared and organized my user research in a way that transitioned to design. That was the key, not the persona itself.
Early in my career, before I was using personas, I was using an alternate approach to manage the user research insights. I used something called a Functional Abstraction Network (FAN), which has Cognitive Work and Information Relationship Requirements bolted on it. This allowed me to transition to design from research just as many people choose to use personas. The projects we worked on covered complex domains and the FAN and its component parts were ideally suited for this work. When I have tried to apply personas to similar domains, I have seen them struggle under the weight of the information and domain complexity they are asked to carry. It is perhaps my naivety or inexperience on using personas that caused this struggle, but it didn't matter since I had a tool at my disposal to do the job well.
Personas are a powerful tool, but we need to remember that they are powerful for what they do, rather than what they are. Designers get into trouble when they focus more on making cool, fun personas at the expense of functional personas - functional and cool would be even better.
Personas can be used and misused. They can be left out altogether. As long as 1) User research is being done, and 2) you have a way to capture that research in a way that will help you design, then you have a good process. Personas, FANs, flowcharts, and all the other methods that are out there are intended to help us. They do not define our work, but help make explicit our work. Personas are a powerful tool, but a good UX Designer has a lot of tools in their tool kits and knows when to pull out the correct one.
When I transitioned employers for the first time in my life I began to finally utilize this UX tool. I would love to say that using personas became a transformational experience - that the products I worked on became exponentially better. But this was not the case. I realized no difference. While product owners loved what I was producing and the designs tested well with end users, this response was similar to what I witnessed before.
After some time of this, I began to think that personas were kind of useless. I started creating personas out of habit to show customers, and then I would basically toss them aside. I would not bring up the persona in design meetings, nor would I use the persona as justification with customers. They existed because they were part of our process. No more, no less. Still, the designs did not suffer.
After a few months of this, I began to do some self-reflection and review. I talked it over with some of my fellow designers. Through all this, I came to a happy understanding with the place of personas in the design process. I arrived at the following conclusions:
Are Personas Critical? No!
Are Personas Useless? No!
Although this seems like a contradiction at first glance, I think this is an important insight.
Alan Cooper is regarded as the father of using Personas in application design. He explains the origins in a post here. This filled a vital need in the product development process. Whereas most applications had been designed using broad, implicit assumptions about the users prior to this (if any were considered at all), the persona laid bare the actual user research and assumptions to be considered during design. This included the user goals and motivations (among other things) for the work the users are trying to do.
This is incredibly important and a crucial step in driving towards the consideration of the user experience. The persona is a wonderful tool to capture user research insights in a simple, direct, engageable manner. The user had a constant presence in the room – on the team even.
So what’s changed that made personas less than essential? Nothing. The key is to remember that the persona is a tool that we have at our disposal. Like all tools, it is made for certain tasks, and sometimes other tools come along that can do that job as well or better, or might be suited to a slightly different task. This doesn’t make personas useless - they are one more tool in the kit.
The persona itself isn’t of great importance, though having a ‘person’ to refer to and talk about can help. What’s valuable is the information that it conveys. The persona is intended as a repository of all the knowledge gained about your users during research that might be useful for the final product. There are several ways to capture this information, of which personas are just 1. Even as my personas became perfunctory, I still prepared and organized my user research in a way that transitioned to design. That was the key, not the persona itself.
Early in my career, before I was using personas, I was using an alternate approach to manage the user research insights. I used something called a Functional Abstraction Network (FAN), which has Cognitive Work and Information Relationship Requirements bolted on it. This allowed me to transition to design from research just as many people choose to use personas. The projects we worked on covered complex domains and the FAN and its component parts were ideally suited for this work. When I have tried to apply personas to similar domains, I have seen them struggle under the weight of the information and domain complexity they are asked to carry. It is perhaps my naivety or inexperience on using personas that caused this struggle, but it didn't matter since I had a tool at my disposal to do the job well.
Personas are a powerful tool, but we need to remember that they are powerful for what they do, rather than what they are. Designers get into trouble when they focus more on making cool, fun personas at the expense of functional personas - functional and cool would be even better.
Personas can be used and misused. They can be left out altogether. As long as 1) User research is being done, and 2) you have a way to capture that research in a way that will help you design, then you have a good process. Personas, FANs, flowcharts, and all the other methods that are out there are intended to help us. They do not define our work, but help make explicit our work. Personas are a powerful tool, but a good UX Designer has a lot of tools in their tool kits and knows when to pull out the correct one.