Personas — training wheels
A persona-hater’s guide to teaching with personas
By Lindsey Wallace PhD
I used to hate personas. “Personas are not real people” I complained. “They’re reductive!” I sneered. “They allow us to build for our imaginations in dress up!” I pouted, probably with an eyeroll thrown in for good measure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since “maturity” is basically coming to appreciate everything you dismissed at one point, my views have evolved and my opinions about personas are more nuanced now. I’ve realized that these drawbacks (while all true) are not the whole story, and depending on the situation, there are other things about personas that make them a critical tool for building a nascent research org, especially in a context where human-centered design is a new practice, a muscle that requires building.
Somehow I’ve found myself neck-deep in persona work, becoming expert in wielding them as a tool for change. I’ve had to grow up about personas. I’ve come to think of personas as training wheels. Personas can help build an organizations’ capacity to imagine the people who use and interact with their products. They prepare organizations for research and extend its impact rather than replacing it.
I spent last week locked in a room with a product and engineering team using personas get a team to answer (speculatively) what I consider…