successful, was seen as radical
within the industry.
By imbuing a persona with
memetic power via alliterative
names like Jessie Jeans Buyer,
these iconic oversimplifications
become shibboleths inside the
corporation, creating significant
cultural resistance to the idea of
refreshing them. As a tangible
output of some process, they
become a new truth that can blind
us from seeing the real world.
Recently, at a design competition hosted by a major software
company, teams were given
fancy new Web-design software
and were asked to create a “safe”
social-networking site for kids,
based on several personas (the kid,
her mother, and her mischievous
friend). The design presentations
were mostly an excuse to show
off some cool visual or interactive
design feature that the team came
up with. There was no examination of what constituted “safe,”
and the personas were regurgitated in the context of the design
solutions with all the subtlety of a
sitcom character. Acknowledging
the time and energy constraints of
a competition, the experience suggests that simply handing someone a persona is not sufficient to
actually engage them in thinking
about a real person. The solutions
were not believable, and since they
were based on fake people, it was
not unexpected.
You might react to this argument by disclaiming that “
personas are just a tool.” So they are,
but tools have affordances, and
they lead to certain types of usage.
When we met with a client to
kick off an in-depth user-research
study, we walked into a conference room where the whiteboard
was filled with aspirational—not
factual—personas. It required
significant organizational effort
to approve the work of studying
real users, but in the meantime, it
was trivial for the team to generate (out of thin air) richly detailed
examples of who those customers
were. Compared side by side with
actual research, persona confabulation requires very little effort. To
make a crude comparison, guns
don’t kill people, but they make it
a lot easier. And personas aren’t
solely responsible for bad design or
solely to blame for the disconnect
between designers and their customers, but they make bad design
a hell of a lot easier. To compound
the problem, personas enable all
of this under a cloak of smug cus-tomer-centricity, while instilling
bemused contempt. As with guns,
we need to be trained to use these
tools safely, but given the prevalence of untrained users and the
ensuing casualties, let’s step back
and consider whether the benefits
of these tools outweigh the risks.
Any process based in falsehood
takes you away from being genuine. If this is the best way we have
to keep the organization focused
on a “real” customer, then we
have larger organizational problems that need to be addressed.
With personas, we’re going down
the wrong path. Rather than create distancing caricatures, tell
stories. Don’t deny the need to
do in-person research with real
people. Look for ways to represent
what you’ve learned in a way that
maintains the messiness of actual
human beings. And understand
that no tool, no method, and no
shortcut, can substitute for real,
in-person interactions. People are
too wonderfully complicated, to be
reduced to plastic toys.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steve is the
founder of Portigal Consulting, a boutique
agency that helps companies discover
and act on new insights about themselves
and their customers. He is an accomplished instructor and public speaker,
and an avid photographer who curates a
Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in
his home. Steve blogs regularly for All This
ChittahChattah, at www.portigal.com/blog.