Personas sans personality
Most new products begin their lives in a workshop and when attending one hosted by a product or service designer (like me) you may have been subjected to the flogged-out Design Thinking tool known as the Persona.
Personas are archetypal representations of potential product users that generalise about users needs, preferences and behaviour so that design decisions (cough, assumptions) can be made about how users will interact with a product.
Well-meaning workshop facilitators the world over typically (enthusiastically) introduce these cobbled-together sheets of generic demographic data with a smiling stock photo and an unimaginative name (sorry, John) slapped in the corner.
Like anything, Personas conform to the garbage-in-garbage-out principle and are only as useful as the effort invested in them. Good Personas help your team relate to the customers whose problems the organisation is trying to solve. If they aren’t relatable and don’t spark recognition in your team, they are best left uninvited to the planning party.
Most of the confusion about Personas comes from a misunderstanding of their purpose. They are not a research tool or a formal encapsulation of market segmentation. They are, in fact, a storytelling device. Their intention is to facilitate the creative process by generating empathy for the end users of your product or service — to stop your team thinking about their own taste and preferences and to instead put themselves in the shoes of someone on the pointy end of your value proposition: “if I were x, how would y make me feel?”
In using Personas you’re trying to get your team to collaboratively write the script in which your users are the characters. When a decision needs to be made, opinions sorted through or new feature ideas prioritised Personas can serve as a North Star for what customers need and experience. This means less arguing over personal preferences and a faster arrival at a decision on what to do next.
In this context you can see that while Personas are good at making group decision-making more productive they aren’t a substitute for data. They are simply a way to articulate emotively: “these are our customers”.
If the business doesn’t have a thorough, data-driven understanding of its real customers already, creating fictional versions of them isn’t going to help. The upstream problem should be dealt with first.
Personas tend to suffer from two typical ailments: they are either a) too tokenistic or b) too literal.
The first case typically occurs when an external agency is brought in to run a design process and they haven’t done their due diligence in truly understanding the client’s business. They don’t understand the business’s actual customers well enough and so have no genuine insight to encapsulate in the Personas they’ve prepared.
If you’re looking at a Persona that feels hollow and superficial and you’re not sure what you should do with it, you can be pretty sure you have a case of tokenism on your hands. You’ve been sold a superficial process rather than a result.
The second case is when a more mature business, with a more traditional approach to marketing, overloads the Persona with all the (certainly valuable) data that they have about their customers, dividing Personas along the same lines that they have used to define and categorise their target market (such as by industry, location, vertical or other quantitative measure).
Here you end up with a Persona that is rich in information but poor in personality — you can’t relate to it or understand what it feels like to be that person. These types of Personas evoke no meaningful emotional response in the reader.
A good set of Personas is informed by the business context and a genuine understanding of the customer but should steer away from facts and towards feelings. In the hands of your team members, it should make them wonder what it’s like to be that customer and what it’s like to interact with your organisation as that customer.
Personas are simply characters in the story of your business, and it’s your job to write the plot.
