Next sprint, we should develop feature X. [Fabricated Persona] really needs this to solve [made up problem].
Tell you what, let’s see once that feature is shipped how accurate your hypothesis about your persona and his/her need was. I’m pretty certain their feedback will be fairly uninspiring (spoiler alert—you can’t hold a conversation with a PDF or a print-out).
The Problem with Personas
One thing that has always plagued me since entering the world of User Experience has been the oft-mentioned act of “creating personas”. From the outside, it appears to be some mystical foray into the minds and bodies of our customers, who we can then neatly bundle up into a small set of personas and base each of our design decision on the wants and needs of these mystical creatures.
I recall first witnessing a session of persona-creation where each of the “customers” was clearly an abstracted version of some of the people working in that office. Right down to their marital status, behavioural traits and even the car which they drove. I’m sorry, but designing the experience for a sophisticated SaaS product has little relationship to the model of car that someone drives. I call bullshit.
See, often personas are crude, over-generalised and grossly-stereotyped depictions of the wrong types of people (i.e. not your customers) or they are derived from some fable which has been dreamt up in the minds of a committee which is horribly disconnected from the world outside.
From the many examples I have seen over the years (and yes I too have been guilty of creating these at one point) what I have seen is that they are often lacking any anchor to the real world. It tends to be an amalgamation of brain farts from heads of business about who they want their ideal customer to be, but the reality is that if you build it—the persona—they probably won’t come.
Let’s take a (terrible) example
Let’s get ourselves on the same page here and see what all this fuss is about. A quick Google search and I actually found that personas are such a commodity, it seems, that you can have a tool generate a persona for you, or just buy them off-the-shelf.
As you can see from the example above (the first image in my Google Search), there is also a helpful article on how to create your very first persona. Let’s just digest this for a minute though. Let’s review each section, piece by piece, and honestly challenge—through the context of the products or services which we are building—if any of this is actually relevant.
Some striking characteristics, to me, are things like his relationship status. Just as putting this on your CV may cause people to draw conclusions, the same effect can occur here. Does the fact that he is “single” affect any other characteristics on this sheet? If he was in a relationship or married, would that change anything? Probably not. It’s a moot point.
It is noted that one of his frustrations is a “saturated tracking market”. If this was a persona for our company and we were thinking to launch a new tracker to the market it seems like this might be a bad idea, as we wouldn’t want to frustrate Clark, would we?
The bar charts and point scales for “motivations”, “preferred channels” and “personality” also bring little to no value. The big danger here is that they are highly abstract concepts which can be interpreted in vastly different ways by different teams or individuals.
He seems overly-motivated by power but doesn’t seem too fussed about fear. Does this make him egotistical? Self-indulgent? Should we design our app to throw power slogans at him and have a big button front and centre that allows him to switch on the selfie-cam to see how powerful he is looking today!? Probably not, but you get my point. How many of these facets only serve to distract those that consume them, instead of informing them?
So, how can we fix it?
The answer is simple really, and should come as no surprise…
Speak to real people, regularly and with genuine interest
That’s it. That is all you have to do. OK, so I understand it is a little more complex than that, but honestly if you or your company have some print-outs of beautiful people on your walls who are fabricated depictions of your customers, please ask yourself: “do these actually reflect reality?”
Maybe they were created off the back of some face-to-face research (kudos for that one), but when did that research take place? Has the product changed since? Have you entered new markets?
Personas (read: people) change. Their behaviours change via increased or decreased interaction with your product and services. External forces are also at play (economical, technological, personal etc). It is completely naive to think that printing out a head shot with some personal details of some fictitious character will serve as the “north star” for your roadmap and product development. Yet so many companies are guilty of this.
They key is to open up channels that facilitate constant conversations
In TravelPerk, since day one, we have always actively sought out potential and actual customers. We have always been very vocal about what we are aiming to achieve and have been humbled to realise when we need to change that course. No poster on the wall is going to give you the feedback that you need. It only serves as a monologue with yourself as your inner demons tell you all of the things that you want to hear to justify your decisions.
The key takeaway here is to stop kidding yourself that personas are a reliable tool for making decisions and emphasise the importance to your colleagues of staying “connected” with the reality outside the four walls of your office. You will be amazed at what you find.
I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the matter and of course, if you enjoyed this little rant, feel free to give it a 👏 or two, or three…
Over the years we have tried various approaches to facilitate constant and qualitative conversations with customers, though there are far too many to mention here, so expect a follow-up post on how we manage to achieve this within TravelPerk. 🎉
People please, not Personas! was originally published in Thoughts from TravelPerk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.