The Problem with Personas and Some Solutions

Improving on Personas

As the UX research and design practice has evolved over many years, we’ve made a substantial leap from the genius designer—or development-centric approaches—to user-focused approaches. For many of these years, personas have been popular tools for bringing designers closer to users. Now, as we continue our effort to improve our methods and tools, perhaps it’s time to revisit how we create and use personas—and make them more real and relatable to designers.

Some of the approaches we’ll suggest here may have varying degrees of practicality or feasibility for a particular UX team—depending on their organizational setup and human and financial resources. However, the idea here is to encourage a dialogue about ways to realize the full potential of personas—or maybe even move beyond them.

Involve Designers in Creating Personas

Well, this is an obvious one. If you don’t do this already, start involving designers in some persona-related research. It is alright to occasionally pry them away from their wireframes and involve them as observers or note-takers during contextual interviews and ethnographic research. Face-to-face exposure to real users drives home the fact that personas represent real people. It also instills a sense of proximity to the users and engenders ownership of the personas.

If it isn’t at all possible for designers to work with researchers, make the data-collection and analysis process transparent and inclusive. You can do this by routinely sharing research data with designers and getting them to weigh in and provide feedback. It can be an especially good idea to share any visual research artifacts such as photos and video recordings to help designers mentally connect personas to real faces and names.

Create Video Personas

Create audio or video versions of your personas—for example, a short mockumentary on a particular user. Using visuals with a voice-over narration or an interview-style format, you can familiarize your audience with a user’s basic personal and professional characteristics. Provide context of use by depicting each persona in a relevant setting—for example, home, work, or travel. This gives the team insights into the user’s environment, behaviors, and challenges. Keep it short, but make it convincing.

Videos can be an engaging reminder of who the users are. Arrange to play back the video personas whenever the team is collaborating, creating empathy maps or user-journey maps, or participating in a brainstorming session.

Role-Play Living, Breathing Personas

Invite Joe to your design studio—or, at least someone who can pass as Joe.

Get actors to role-play personas. These needn’t be professional actors, but perhaps coworkers from another department who can stick to a script and sound believable. No one can argue that a living, breathing persona would not fare much better than an 8x11, taped-to-the-wall version in being more relatable and memorable to designers.

Give your actors as much background information as possible about each persona. Have them introduce themselves to your team as the character they’re playing, then talk about their goals and aspirations in an easy, informal way. Make this a meet-and-greet, not Q&A session. The actors may not have answers to specific questions. Video recording the role-play session may be helpful for future reference.

Move Beyond Personas

Lastly, you should consider reducing an over-reliance on personas by developing an affinity toward real users. Perhaps you could invest in direct partnerships between designers and real users, enabling users to work closely with designers. Have typical users meet and interact with design teams frequently. Or, budget permitting, retain a small sample group of users to be involved at each step and iteration of the design process. Refer to real conversations, quotations, and scenarios in design communications.

We know doing this is easier said than done and carries inherent risks. For one, it’s an expensive proposition, requiring a much bigger effort to pull off. And then, there’s the peril of over-fixation on the users you’ve involved, with a resulting loss of focus on the collective needs of the larger user group. However, you can mitigate this problem through certain checks and balances such as avoiding always validating designs with the same set of users or rotating through different sets of users for different iterations.

As we continue to grow and evolve as UX professionals, we shouldn’t shy away from making some well-thought-out investments and exploring audacious, new possibilities. Such efforts could bring huge paybacks in improving the eventual product.