Recently I have attended a meeting where the discussion was about user personas and how they would help us deliver better solution to our users. This made me think about what I had read about them, what my previous experience with them was, look at how they had helped others and if they could add value to our situation.
Searching “user persona” in google shows more than 390 million results. Having so much information means people should be able to understand what it is and how to use it. But still, it seems to me that there is misunderstanding of how personas can be used and provide value.
Personas are a good way to express effectively who your users are. They were officially introduced by Alen Cooper as a design tool which can improve the communication and understanding of the team for their users and how and why the design will work for them.
“While there was still resistance to this unfamiliar method, the programmers could clearly see the sense in my designs because they could identify with these hypothetical archetypes.”
Alen Cooper – The origin of personas
What grabbed my attention from Cooper’s post is the “the programmers could clearly see the sense in my designs” part. This makes the user personas a tool for designers which helps them in the communication and clarification of their ideas and designs on a high level. They could help us on generalizing and agreeing on what our users look like and what their high level goals are. This leads us to creating a common understanding across the organization.
User personas are an inseparable part of the design thinking process (the exploration of the problems) where the goal is to understand users by developing empathy and provide them with a solution that will solve their problem. So we can see that user personas are very valuable in the phase of understanding customer needs and suggesting possible solutions.
Besides developing empathy and while trying to figure out what your user’s problems are and how to solve them, user personas can be very valuable in the correct validation of your assumptions with the proper users. Doing your research with the right target users can save you a lot of resources and iterations at later stages.
Once we have explored our user’s problem, we have to move on with developing a possible solution for it. Here we can misinterpret the benefits of the user personas. Yes, they will provide us the common understanding of the user but they are still a high level overview of our customers. User personas cannot provide us with the specifics, context, activities, and problems that need to be taken under consideration when developing our solution. There are some techniques like “empathy mapping” and “jobs to be done” which can cover the mentioned limitations. Sometimes even user personas may be made up (Fictional Personas) which could lead us in a situation where we are developing a solution for a user that does not exist.
Having all of this in mind I would say that user personas can be beneficial but also if not used properly can lead you into the wrong direction of nowhere.
User Personas can help you:
- Explore more efficiently the problems of your users;
- Do better researches and validations with the proper users;
- Help you in the communication and understanding across the organization (developers could start understanding the hard parts of the design);
Consider the following when using personas:
- Be careful with “Fictional Personas” so you don’t develop a solution for a user that does not exist;
- Make sure to keep them up to date;
- Think of the limitations they have and how to overcome them – missing specifics, context, details of activities and problems (those limitations can be covered by empathy mapping and jobs to be done)
Read more:
The origin of personas
https://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/05/the_origin_of_personas/
Personas in Design thinking
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them
Jobs to be Done
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQjBawcU_qg
Empathy mapping
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/
Marc Abraham, My Product Management Toolkit, 2018
