How to Ensure User Personas Don’t Fail
How to think strategically about personas in a persona-weary world
Reading Time: 11 minutes
How can we design user personas that get used?
You may have noticed some skepticism about user personas in your company. Many designers work at companies focused on quantitative data, and these companies aren’t quick to trust qualitative data from designers.
Skepticism is a real issue, but what is the antidote?
If you're creating personas at quant-focused companies, it's even more vital that you approach personas correctly. If you create a pretty persona with no research to back it up, skepticism toward UX personas will turn into outright rejection.
What are User Personas in UX?
User Personas are a framework for communicating emerging user insights through qualitative and quantitative data.
Real personas aren't one-size-fits-all. Their purpose is to help you customize your product to your customer.
Since their introduction in 1983 by Alan Cooper, personas have been useful for making products specific rather than one-size-fits-all. That's their primary purpose: avoiding a generic approach to product design.
If your UX personas aren't specific or tied to real data, you're missing the point of personas.
Many people define personas as a fictional representation of a user that might use a product or service. We think the “fictional” aspect of this definition is part of the reason for the skepticism. At the Fountain Institute, we prefer to define user personas as a framework for communicating emerging user insights through qualitative and quantitative data.
In a sense, personas without rigor are exactly the generic approach to design that Alan Cooper sought to eliminate in the 80s. Fluffy personas without research are a generic approach to design. They're a mock-up of research, not research.
What is the user persona process?
Do user research.
Find patterns.
Visualize results.
Real personas are tools of Design Synthesis. Synthesis happens after you’ve gathered data from research and before you apply that research into a design. This stage is critical to making your research useful.
Personas themselves are not research methods. I'll repeat it for those in the back: personas are not research methods. They communicate the findings of other research methods, but they’re not a method themselves. Personas are artifacts of research, and they work best as tools for design synthesis.
Design synthesis is one of the most misunderstood phases of UX design. Most designers do this privately in their heads when they learn something from an interview and turn this insight into a visual deliverable like a wireframe.
Personas are an excellent way to synthesize research about the user without leaving the problem space and jumping to solutions immediately. Personas allow stakeholders to focus on what's essential about users and can provide perspective on user problems.
The main thing to remember is that personas are synthesis tools and should come after research, not before it.
Personas are frameworks for communicating emerging user insights, and they should never be confused with the act of finding these user insights through research.
Personas are useful because they can rally stakeholders around user needs rather than features. The problem comes when designers think of these synthesis tools as a method in and of themselves.
Should I use a persona template?
Real personas aren't decorations so you shouldn’t use templates.
As UX design has entered the mainstream startup, every deliverable related to user research is suddenly a "must-have." Some companies seek user research artifacts like user flows, journey maps, and personas like they’re trophies.
As a design community, we have turned personas into a way to prove our UX credentials. UX design is a desirable career now, making a post-UX world that loves to “mock-up” a UX designer's work. Fake personas aren't helping with the skepticism that many designers feel from stakeholders.
Some designers create personas reverse-engineered from Google image search and a few interviews with people they already knew. Even worse, persona templates are circulating the internet, influencing designers to follow a generic approach…which is ironic because the whole point of personas is to make your general user base more specific.
Persona templates are filled to the brim with useless details and unnecessary decorations, making the rigorous approaches of UX research look like a paint-by-numbers activity.
UX designers want to be doers, not decorators. Ironically, these same designers have decided that decorating personas is the way to get there.
Can a scientific researcher create a persona full of gradients and Unsplash photos? It's hard to imagine because scientific research is considered rigorous, while UX research is often seen as fluff, especially by quant-focused business owners.
How can I avoid persona skepticism and failure?
Research rigor is the antidote to skepticism.
If you present your entire six-week research project as a pretty set of personas, it's understandable that stakeholders might wonder how you got there. This lack of understanding is...understandable.
Your stakeholders weren't there for all twenty user interviews. They weren't there when you realized that real people use your product for reasons the company never imagined. Their skepticism is rooted in the fact that they weren't there for the UX research. Why should they believe you?
The question you should ask yourself is, "Did I uncover enough user insights to warrant a persona?"
When designers answer “no” to this question and still make a persona, that’s where the industry runs into skepticism. A lack of rigor by UX designers will only fuel this healthy skepticism.
If you’re asking your stakeholders to trust a generalization about users only you have noticed, you must present your discovery process. Much like the quick judgments that fuel bad personas, stakeholders will judge all personas as empty and biased if you don't present them right.
In ten years of product design, I've never seen a stakeholder accept an insight without wanting to know the origin story. I don't blame them. It's still a new idea that designers can be researchers. Luckily, there are a few things that you can do to help communicate your process.
When presenting your user insights in the form of a persona, keep these eight things in mind to avoid stakeholder skepticism:
[Eight do's and eight don'ts to help you create more strategic UX personas]
Why are user personas important?
UX personas augment analytics by making sense of qualitative data and providing context for analytics.
Spreadsheets alone aren't enough to visualize the untapped potential in your customer base.
The reality of a post-analytics world is that data collection tools are evolving faster than our ability to make sense of the data they contain. Today more than ever, UX personas are a practical framework for communicating the "why" behind complex user data.
As designers, your power lies in making the unseen tangible. Embrace this power and visualize your users strategically with a UX Persona.
