Towards a more Effective Persona
I have a love/hate relationship with personas. That’s not quite right; that’s too strong. It’s more like I have a like/dislike relationship with personas. What I like about personas is that they can breathe life into a generic, otherwise faceless “customer”, or worse still “user”.
What I dislike about personas is that often they are ineffective imitations. They take a real-life, flesh and blood — and emotions and aspirations and fears and limitations — person, and may reduce them down into a few glib bullet points. Often the bullets points fail to capture those emotions, aspirations, fears, limitations and so on.
Which is to say, most of the time, I think that most people are doing personas wrong. They lack empathy for the subject.
One criticism of personas is that they capture information that is mostly irrelevant to the job to be done. For example, what does it matter about a person’s age, gender, occupation and socioeconomic status if we are talking about whether a chocolate bar can satisfy their hunger or not? Often it is this type of cookie-cutter demographic information that is gathered in a persona that limits their usefulness for answering any meaningful questions.
One of the classic examples of jobs to be done is the milkshake. A fast-food chain discovered that during the morning, their sales of…
