The Value of Personas

“What do we gain — and what might we miss — when we reduce people to models?”

There has been a lot of discussion in the UX community around the importance of using personas as a tool to help understand who we are designing for.

In the past, I’ve had instructors with senior UX roles in various companies tell me that personas are something that clients ask for but are rarely used during the design process. It’s been said that personas are a waste of time, but they are something that you just must produce, or that they over-generalize users and reinforce the notion of stereotypes.

On the flip side, I’ve also heard stories from other UX practitioners that, during project meetings, their company adds extra chairs for each persona to make sure that staff remember to keep users a part of the discussion.

When I think about how personas have been used in my projects, I think about the important role they have played in filling the communication gap within the project team as well as help to synthesize user research insights.

To me, personas are a valuable communication tool in our design toolbox and serve as an aid in aligning the project team. Personas remind the team who you’re designing for and what the principal tasks they need to accomplish. If done properly, personas are a way to document the variety of users that need to interact with your products and the different purpose that each of them might have. Because of this, they can also help define the core aspects in whatever you’re building versus the nice-to-have features. I have also found personas useful when talking to leadership about the pain points users experience with the systems we have in place.

Another benefit to using personas is that they provide a means to capture insights from your user research so that you can synthesize your findings into something tangible. After coding transcripts and finding themes, personas can be used to represent the different users of your product or application. Having personas to represent your key userbase, assists in framing the problems that we’re trying to we are trying to solve for.

When done correctly, personas are an effective tool that can be used to align teams and structure insights.