97% of personas are bullshit. Here’s why.
What do I call a “bullshit persona”?
Here’s the situation. A team of 5, 6, 7, x people gather to create a persona for a project they are working on. They have identified a problematic, whether it’s improving a telecom customer experience, or changing an interface used daily by employees.
After understanding the concept of persona, the following dialogue ensues:
“Ok. Is our persona a woman or a man?
-A woman.
-Ok, how old is she? Maybe 35, what do you think?
-Yes, seems good to me.
(continue dialogue)”
And ta-da, a persona is born!
Except… except that’s exactly how most of bullshit personas are created. The team hasn’t met any of the actual or potential users. There is no user involved in the Design Thinking process. Well, some testing will probably happen at some point (but it will already be too late).
Let’s ask: why is your persona 35? What makes you think she uses Twitter and not Instagram? How can you define her intrinsic motivations since you have not met any of your users?
A persona is a type of user based on behavior. If you don’t get to see or understand their behavior, you create a non-existent persona, based on anything but an actual user.
Bullshit personas are bullshit because they tell a lot not about your end users, but who the team thinks the end user is. And that’s not only a tremendous gap, but also a terrifying assumption to make. The team creating a bullshit persona (and I have myself created more bullshit personas than I’d like to admit) doesn’t know, it assumes. The team co-create, sure, but doesn’t have any data to back their assumptions.
That’s part of the reason why I’ve seen many people discredit the concept of persona. You can’t think it’s helpful or important in any way if you’ve only created wrong ones. Bullshit personas make all personas irrelevant.
The good news is: it’s not too late!
I do tend to be a little bit melodramatic, but here’s what I’ve been teaching last year engineer students.
Don’t get me wrong: I do believe in the dynamic and the creativity of Design Thinking workshop. It’s powerful. I’ve seen teams come up with amazing ideas and end up with a great MVP after 3 days.
But not everything needs to be created during the workshop. That’s exactly why you need a User Research phase.
During your research, you need to gather 2 types of data:
- Quantitative data: surveys, market studies, marketing segments, CRM data etc.
2. Qualitative data: interviews, ethnographic research, focus groups, observation…
Ok, fine. But how do I get data?
For quantitative data, the best is to allocate some time and resources to it. Start a survey, a market study. Read documentation, articles, balance sheets, white papers, anything. If you’re working for a client, my bet is that they probably have more data than they need. So, just ask for what you need. Marketing segments and researches are among the best sources to help you deliver this task.
Now, for qualitative data, the best is to do it yourself. You go there, you meet people, you start interviews, you start in-situ observations, focus groups, and you document everything. My advice is to be a team of 2–3 people (and yes, goes without saying that designers must be involved) and to split up when necessary. It’s important to create the 1–1 contact with the end user, because that’s how you understand conscious and subconscious pain points.
And then, you get in your workshop with your persona(s) already created, and have your team review it and ask questions. That way, your personas aren’t bullshit anymore.
Conclusion: what to do if you already have a “bullshit persona?”
Happened to me once, when I was facilitating a big, complex, 3-day-Design-Thinking workshop. On the 2nd day, we had one group completely change their persona. They had to go backwards and it messed up the planning, and it was a bit difficult to facilitate, but in the end, their new persona ended up being the right one to address the issue they were facing. I remember the group coming towards me and saying “Our persona is wrong. We need to change it or we’re wasting our time.”
If you don’t have a relevant persona, the good thing is you can find out why it’s not relevant. List what’s wrong about it, and make it right. It’s never too late to change, to switch personas. Let me go further and add that personas, and Design Thinking artifacts in general, are never “done”. They evolve on their own, but also with one another (empathy map, as-is journey etc.). I usually think of it all as a living ecosystem.
If at the end of your project, your persona is the same when you’ve created it initially, you might have missed something. But you also can be in the remaining 3%.
