Lighthouses and Little Lies. The Right Way to Use Personas?

“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.” — Bruce Lee

This well-known quote by Bruce Lee is a favourite of mine. His wisdom is a great example of someone who has reached a certain level of mastery. A major difference between knowing a skill and mastering it is knowing when not to use it and how you can change it.

I am currently enjoying mentoring several people new to the User Experience (UX) field. I find it enjoyable as it helps me to both contribute to the development of others and provides an excellent window onto my own expertise.

During a recent chat, one of the mentees asked me about personas, artefacts that are at first accessible then confounding.

He asked questions like;

• How much detail should I include in them?
• When in the process should we use them and update them?
• How do I get the developers on the project to use them?

I decided to answer the question first by discussing how personas might be intended to work in an ideal world. This non-exhaustive advice included the following:

• Personas should be used routinely as a pivot for conversations and decision making. Anyone involved in creating the product needs to be comfortable referencing and validating the personas naturally as they perform their work.
• They are just one of a series of models required to describe your project’s current truth and shared understanding. If you are asking how detailed they should be or what format to use; the answer is that this is just a function of what you currently understand and the conversations you can use them in. As the conversations expand, so should your models.
• They should be continually updated as you (and the team collectively) both learn something new or discover the existing iteration fails to explain an observed phenomenon.
• They exist as a shared cultural artefact rather than the possession of a UX practitioner. I use the term cultural artefact because alongside providing information about the intended users, their pattern of use provides insight into the culture that produces them.

Our experience, particularly in more traditional environments tells us that reality is often different from this ideal picture. Even very junior people can identify that there are a lot of barriers for these things to happen (more on that in another post).

Experienced practitioners recognise that performing the rituals and creating artefacts of design will have limited impact without the right mindset and culture across the team and broader organisation. To build better products we also need to build better teams and cultures. Change at this level is daunting for many organisations and product designers.

However understanding the ideal state provides a lighthouse that signals towards the future and becomes an inspiration for action. When things inevitably don’t work out as planned you will need to understand the underlying intent of the tools you use. Only then can you adapt and modify them with confidence to suit your context. This is the essence of strategy; specific action in the context of both where you are and where you need to go.

So if we haven’t achieved the ideal are we wasting our time? No. Understanding the ideal provides us with the vision needed to adapt when we inevitably meet cultural and organisational barriers. But even limited use of tools like personas can be useful stepping stones along the way.

I am reminded of a quote by Terry Pratchett (Science of Discworld) about the lies we tell children in the course of their education. These ‘lies’, such as the Earth being round, DNA being structured like a ladder or electrons orbiting like planets aren’t strictly true. But they prepare a child’s mind “towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie.”

The lies help avoid unnecessary burdens during the first encounter with a concept. I don’t know of many teams that could jump to a mature use of personas or similar models immediately. Trying to is a recipe for paralysis. However even imperfect practice prepares a team for an incremental journey towards greater mastery and results.

Guided by the light of an ideal future, you can respond with more accurate explanations, more nuanced information as the team discovers that their current understanding isn’t ‘strictly true’. With practice you can reject what is useless, adapt what is useful and move towards a more accurate explanation.