Persona Non Grata
Posted on August 18th, 2005 in Usability | 2 Comments »
Adaptive Path (Dan Saffer) — “The main cause of this mess is that half of the personas out there are entirely made up, with no user research to back them. In most cases, no one on the design team has talked directly to users to find out who they are, so designers come up with an idea of a user type. The resulting personas are like the designer’s imaginary friends.”
I don’t like personas. In the time it takes to create these “imaginary friends” I could have worked with several real users. I know that other folks think personas are valuable, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
2 Responses
I attended the latest UIE roadshow where Kim Goodwin from Cooper presented a 1-day seminar on Personas. The biggest take-away was that the people creating the personas should be the same people that interviewed/observed the users in the first place. And those are the same people that will design the interface.
From that, I concluded that Personas are a tool to share the user research with the development team and other stakeholders, but don’t and can’t replace the designers’ deeper knowledge gained from doing the research in the first place.
That’s the ideal case, anyway. I’m curious if others find them useful in situations where the researcher is different from the designer or if there are more effective methods.
I’ve only used them when “forced” to; mostly I’ve seen them misused. Created to represent what we think people are like, or as a club used by marketers to reject any findings outside their predefined customer (“Well, then they aren’t a Server Sam”).
My favorite line was ” For some, they form an artificial barrier between the designer’s product and its users. ” True, true, true. The stock photo with the dumb-ass name (Mobile Mike, Cash-and-Carry Kerry) that find their way into everyday conversation are not about designing for people, but for caricatures.
I think the real world is too messy – in every sense – for some types of people – and it’s scary and hard to filter, so cleaning things up with a fresh and lovely persona is a way to eliminate some of that fear.
Thanks for the alert.