Short post: stop using photos in your personas!
Personas. The worst way to summarise and present your customer data (except for all the others).
Personas have been around a long time, originally conceived as a way to help product teams empathise with their target user, usually someone they have never met.
Mention personas to a group of marketers or product designers and you will probably receive a few eye-rolls, and a few of the standard objections (“There’s no such thing as an average person” or “They alienate you from the real users” etc).
Personas are difficult to do well and so seem to fail more often than they succeed. But as with any tool the issue is usually in the execution rather than the tool itself. I think personas can be and often are very useful ways to summarise customer data.
They are usually overcooked — if a persona looks nice and glossy it almost certainly took too much time to produce. The important parts of a persona are in the content, not the presentation.
But my main gripe with most personas is the use of photography, usually stock photography.
Photographs spoil personas
Using photography in a persona undermines the data. It introduces a tidal wave of bias into a tool used to convey objective research findings.
Humans are prone to an inordinate number of cognitive biases. Our role as designers is to recognise and counter these biases in ourselves. This is (in part) why good design is based on sound UX research.
Photos are distracting
A human nuero-psychological trait is to find and focus on human faces. Heatmap studies of web pages will always show hotspots over faces, regardless of real interest.
So that photo on the side of your persona (probably a throwaway element you didn’t think much about) is sucking attention away from what you really want your stakeholders to focus on — the research.
Photos inject bias and subjectivity
As humans we are also (unfortunately) prone to prejudice and stereotyping. So your photo is bringing all of that unconscious bias and subjectivity into a tool used to unify people around objective research.
Take a look at any persona photo and I guarantee your mind will be already making judgements or assumptions about the person before you’ve read a word.
Maybe they look a bit like someone you used to know. Maybe you find their smile to be a little false. Maybe you like their choice of clothing. This is all prejudicial to the persona data.
Because this is all in the mind of the reader, it will be different every time and the designer can neither measure nor control it.
What to do instead?
Personas, as I mentioned above, are in part used to drive empathy and empathy is easier when there is a visual representation of the persona, there’s no getting around that.
So my proposal is if we must have a picture we stop using photographs, and opt for more neutral illustrations instead. This compromise allows product teams to ‘put a face to a name’ but limiting the inflow of bias to interpretation of the persona data.
As they clearly aren’t intended to be a real person, illustrations are less biased, more inclusive, arguably with more personality than stock, and definitely cheaper.
What do you think? Please do leave a comment with thoughts and experience.
