Piecing together personas
A short note on why personas need a purpose
User centred design buzz words are trendy right? None more so than personas. This phrase, in particular, seems to have become one of those overused phrases that can be used on any and every project. From the middle of everything shifting over to digital, more and more companies have built and used personas to inform their design decisions but are these personas being built correctly or are they just being built to be lost in the process?
I’m writing this post as what I’m starting to notice is more and more company-wide personas. These are generalised personas that act as the sole user base for startups (and sometimes larger companies) to draw insights from and inform certain design decisions.
The topic of personas is a wide reaching one. Although it is possible to define personas for a large amount of users, my point is that you cannot set a persona for an overall structure as they become inflexible.
Personas are essentially a way to model your research around a collection of specific or memorable characteristics. Persona’s will have goals, tasks, needs and pain points that are a true reflection of the target user you are designing for. As all of this changes so should your persona.
I learned that personas are an essential part of what constitutes the goal-directed process. I learned that personas, though important, are never used in isolation, but rather are implemented in conjunction with other processes, concepts and methods that support and augment their use. — Shlomo Goltz
I believe there are multiple problems with company-wide personas and it is these problems that can affect a product negatively in the long run.
Once a persona becomes generalised it becomes outdated. Startups or larger companies once sole source of truth for their user becomes a useless sketch. This over generalisation can also lead to worse problems in the long term when multiple types of users emerge from a brand when they are only focused on designing for one.
I’m not saying personas are an easy task. Just that generalising them is a big mistake, whatever the scale of the company or project. For every member of a team working on these generalised personas, they could be missing out on valuable insights from real user persona relationships.
Once a persona becomes generalised it becomes outdated.
We should work towards creating personas that can be constantly updated and remastered. After every session whatever stage in a project or company, we should take the insights drawn and use them to build our personas, not only the product. These personas should be specific for tasks, specific for age or gender and give a true reflection of certain scenarios. I believe this is the best way because, at the end of the day, your design decisions should be for actual people, not generalised user types.
