Cardboard Personas Aren’t Worth the Paper They’re Written On

Many current development methodologies, including RUP and Agile, recommend the use of personas as a means to help developers represent and empathize with the users’ needs, skills, goals, and desires of the product. This recommendation can appear – I don’t know – overwhelming (?), and may not even be possible for someone within development to accomplish, and so is handled as a bit of process to be overcome. Some casual user information is documented; a work environment is imagined; a silly name is chosen. The resulting persona is likely too broad, too unrealistic and 2-dimensional. This is unfortunate, because a good persona is very valuable, while a carefully selected persona or two are worth their weight in gold.

The reason these methodologies (and I) recommend the use of personas is because they:

1. Focus everyone on the team on the same set of user needs, skills, goals and environment
2. Equally empower everyone on the team to make good decisions
3. Provide everyone with a common language of the user

A good persona should feel like a real person. They have conflicting needs, unspoken career and lifestyle goals, bosses, spouses and co-workers who influence their options and approaches. From a distance, a good persona is someone you would recognize as human, certainly something more than a stereotype. Up close, a good persona is someone the developers empathize with so well that they can consider and evaluate multiple feature implementation options that would satisfy the persona.

All that said, a good persona isn’t good enough to use in development if his/her needs, skills, goals and influences can be superset-ed by a better persona. Remember, one of most valuable contributions of the persona is to reduce the set of concerns from every possible customer demand to meeting this one (imaginary) user’s needs.

It’s as if:

• Before you were looking at the people in grand central station at rush hour, while
• After you are working with one carefully chosen individual from that crowd.

So, one of the important tricks of personas discovery is to carefully choose the one individual whose needs and skills would result in an implementation that meets the needs and skills of the larger group of people. Finding “the right” personas can be difficult, consumes upfront time, and requires a mix of technical, business and product judgment to get right – yet they are well worth the effort.

The good news is that your personas won’t change significantly release to release – at least not any more than a real human beings needs might have changed over that period of time. “The right” personas have immediate and longer-term payoffs including improved decision making in development, empowered developers, vastly reduced rework, lowered frustrations and increased productivity. If you’re still using cardboard personas, you’re shortchanging your development effort.