Personas: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

James Bailey
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

A Brief History on Personas

Over 30 years ago, Alan Cooper had an idea, where he leveraged insights from conversations with software users. In his book written in 1998 called “The inmates are running the asylum” he coined the phrase User Persona. In 1993 Ogilvy wrote about “Customer Prints” using marketing characteristics for representative users. In the same year Verplank, Fulton, Black and Moggridge presented “Observation and Invention: the use of scenarios in interaction design” at InterCHI which introduced “characters” based on direct
user observation.

Eventually (and slowly) the software industry adopted personas and the practice spread. Personas are now a heavily researched area of product management, development and related disciplines.

What is a Persona?

Personas are fictional characters which are created based on research that represent different user types that might use your service, product, website or brand. Furthermore, a persona is a tool used to create an ideal, reliable and realistic representation of a specific audience. It can be helpful for the designer to step outside their preconceived notions and help them recognize that different people have different needs and expectations. In addition, personas can make the design task less complex, as well as guide the ideation processes and add a good user experience for your target audience.

The Good

There are good personas out there but they take time. The quicker you can zero in on who the customer is and what their desires are the better you can develop a persona that is specific and accurate. Below are some questions that should be asked when evaluating if your persona is a good one:

1.) Is the persona taken from interviews with real customers?

2.) Does it evoke empathy? (ie: does it have a name, photo, narrative)

3.) Does it appear realistic to people that deal with customers day-to-day?

4.) Is it unique?

5.) Does the persona include high level goals and state the key goal?

6.) Are there just enough personas for variety, but not too many that no one can remember them?

7.) Is the persona a practical tool for a product team to make decisions?

The Bad

Early designers and researchers learned that is was hard to sell design research within and without their company. Research is expensive, it’s hard to prove a return on investment (ROI) and it takes a lot of time at the beginning of the design and development process. This has led to some shortcuts when it comes to developing personas. Let’s call these personas Bad Personas. These personas are feeble at best, because research was gathered in a sloppy manner. For example, you might get 5 user interviews instead of 15 contextual inquires or better yet, 2 quick phone interviews and some marketing data.

You get the picture. Personas that were not just partly made up, but with no solid foundation of first-hand user research. They are easy to produce but may not be useful, or even worse deceptive in their authority as a UX tool. Furthermore, it gives designers the aura of a rich persona, but not enough research to back it up.

The Ugly

What’s worse you ask? Well, it’s a persona that is truly fictional. One that is based on no direct interaction with the customer. In fact, it is based on only marketing data or the opinions of company stakeholders. Let’s call these just plain Ugly Personas which are devoid of all substance. These Ugly Personas are empty and not based on direct user research, with superfluous details that are not taken seriously. In fact, when a product development team is presented with one of these they usually just ignore it.

Goodbye

In conclusion, I say all is not lost. Good personas allow us to have extended role-play with our users which serve a need that is not being filled by any other UX tool. By using grounded first-person research that shows what is important to the user, this allows the design/development team to scan, parse and leverage this information.

In addition, you can bolster your personas by using direct research in concert with real photos, audio or a video of people in their environment. Through the steps of solid research, creative analysis and engaging presentation we can can continue to make personas an integral part of the design and development process.