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.