How to take the best from Personas
This is the second part of my writing on personas, I will emphasize the good uses of personas, on how they can be useful and smart in some cases, the first part was focused on the over-use of personas and how they can lead you to unconscious mistakes by hidden flaws, I advise you to take a look before reading this one, it is available here:
When your vision is blurred by deadlines & efficiency a persona can reminds your original purpose.
Persona is here to reminds at designers that they are designing for people who are not only consumers, my opinion on this statement is mainly negative as said in the first part, but I believe that for designers working in big industry who must deliver a huge and a quick amount of works it is an important reminder.
There is not a lot of time for UX or emotional design and with a high rhythm, your deadline is probably eating these attentions on users.
Thus, having a cheat-sheet used carefully will help on this way, it will remind you that before all you are designing something for a public, so satisfying this public must be your first motivation, it should not come from the stress of your upcoming deadline or your boss asking on your progress, easy to say and not always relevant I am aware.
Your product is for a large spectrum of users not stereotyped personalities except if it is designed for only specific people.
Talking about specific product, this is where personas show their full potential in my opinion. As I said previously personas tend to make us see our users as 3 up to 5 different personalities so five different uses and expectation in our product which is totally false, it is too reducing, unless for a specific product.
Indeed, while designing a specific product with a special context of use, it is priceless to have a list of these specificities from your user’s perspective.
Let’s take an example, a website which helps people suffering of color blind, it is obvious that you have to design it for color blinded people, it would be unfortunate to forget this primordial need.
Easy case because there is only one restriction, now imagine designing an UI for a machine which must take in charge people coming into a hospital. It must guide them where they are supposed to be for their appointments or medical consultations.
It seems pretty simple to design at the first sight, but do not forget that you are designing for an hospital, so your users are susceptible to have diseases and, or handicaps, you have to take all of these kind in considerations while working. There are plenty of inherent variables so you will not be able to design for every case, but you have to do for as much a you can.
A persona will be helpful for that, because you will probably forget something or simply because a designer have not a knowledge on everything, and that is totally fine, personas are here to help you on that point, nicely done they will tell you as much knowing you need in order to build a UI for every kind of people.
Keep an eye on your persona, not both. It is important to not take everything as granted in personas, the designer keeps the responsibility of his product, he should not rest on personas.
This is the main flaw of personas and it do not inner from them, it is come from designers who rest on them. Statistics given by personas should not be taken as raw truth, people described in them do not even exist most of the time.
They should be considered as reminders, as a post-it telling you some information that you cannot always keep in your mind, they just display directions, they are not detailed road maps which must be read meticulously (I am telling this for most common projects).
Obviously, as said previously the more your product is built for a specific public the more your personas should be detailed and they will definitely turn into road maps at a point.
Personas are made to evolve and adapt, they should not stay generic sheets otherwise they will turn your project into generic projects.
Screw the rules of personas, build them in order to take the best from them, they have to shape into what you need, not the opposite.
My english is far from perfection, you are very likely to find some mistakes or syntax errors, do not hesitate to tell me what I did wrong.
Massive thanks for reading and if you enjoyed it, please recommend it !
