Great article. I’ll be honest, I’m one of the offenders you speak of at the beginning of your article. Frankly, I agree with you.
I understand your stance on being anti-template or framework but it seems like the issue is more of a symptom of lack of methodology.
If there’s no exact template or framework, then we, as designers, are shooting in the dark and we must learn through trial and error which makes proper methodology in the field seem hazy.
100% agree on validating assumptions through testing and conversations with your users but what is the flexible methodology we can use to understand how these personas should be discovered and laid out? You seem to have lots of experience here so I’d ask you to provide some examples that show a common method used to arrive at completely disparate personas i.e. the resultant persona used for a mobile banking app will be much different than that of a tool built for an internal marketing team to manage ads. So what’s the common method we should be using?
Once again, great read, awesome insights.
