The critique about personas and how to make them more actionable

Identify the most important 1 or 2 pieces of information

Jan 12, 2022

In 2020, I wrote “Using user interviews to create personas”. Recently, I’ve revisited that writing because there are legitimate complaints about personas. Some have suggested killing personas (only to replace with persona groups, minimalist personas, persona spectrums). And this debate isn’t new, going back to at least 2006 with Chapman’s paper “The Personas’ New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments against a Popular Method. Can personas help product managers and if so, how?

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One of the biggest complaints detractors have of personas is the practical limitations when trying to use personas.

A former Microsoft user research writes:

What happens when different team members draw different inferences? Or they misremember the persona? Or they create another persona alongside the creators’ sanctioned ones?

Reasonable complaints. So, I spent some time reading through research to uncover the good and bad about personas and how to make personas more useable in practice.

Two biggest complaints about personas

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There’s no single, agreed-upon process or template for creating a persona.
Ask two practitioners what’s a good persona and you’re likely to get two very different answers. They vary in format, type of detail, and level of detail. A quick google search showcasing some variations:
Including Myers Briggs personality information … I wondering how that data was obtained.
Personal internet usage data…this person is a light gamer, but loves banking, almost as much as browsing, whatever that means, that different than social media.
This one includes brands. Are these aspirations or based on actual purchases?
Even among experts such as Cooper, Pruitt and Adlin, and Lene Neilson, you’ll see differences in how they describe personas and their creation process. This doesn’t make it easy to put personas into practice, but let’s move on.
How readers interpret personas can vary significantly.
Don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at two extremes. On one end, personas are fully ignored. Here’s a quote from one designer.

That [personal] data is not useful at all... The reason why is that, if this were a real human being, yeah, I might care. But given that it's a persona, what it actually does is that it creates the illusion that this is a real person.
On the other side, some people treat personas as a real-user and “create stories” to make personas even more real. A quote from a different designer.
[My colleague] comes in one day and says, ‘Bob [persona] and Jennifer [persona] are having an affair but Bob does not want anybody to know about it.’ He created this elaborate story. It makes it fun to design the feature.

Enough snark, but if personas lack an agreed-upon process/output and can have varying interpretations, should we justditch them? Are personas good at all?

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Here’s the good news. Research and practice have demonstrated that personas are great at summarizing user research for communication. Whether is qualitative or quantitative user data, all that data needs to be condensed. Most of us simply can’t recall it all or make sense of it. Personas are a great way to refer to an “idealized” or archetype user that represents a group of related users. It’s easier to create this persona than remember individual pieces of facts.

This may sound all great, but even if personas are based on real user data and communicate a representative person, 1) what’s the difference between persona and marketing segmentation and 2) how do product managers use the information in a persona during product discovery/delivery?

Making Personas Actionable

Ignore segmentation information. Most segmentation, such as demographic, geographic, attitudinal segmentation, is not sufficient in detail to help product managers with product or feature ideation. They are helpful in performance marketing outreach, but you can’t design products or features only based on demographics or geographic information. How would you build a product for a 40-year-old male living in Australia who cares about the environment? It’s too broad a question. Thus, for personas created for product managers, I don’t focus on this information, which also has the benefit of staying away from sterotyping and clashing with marketing.
Identifying the most important pain or motivator to focus upon (at the moment). The personas I focus upon are the ones that highlight pain points or motivators. But not just single word motivators such as “fear” or “achievement”. Instead, I write out sentences. For example, if a persona is motivated by achievement, achievement of what? Is it the achievement of a specific status such as recognition? Is it an award? It is a specific accomplishment? Through user research, I look for themes around common or recurring pain points and motivators and write them down with specifics that can link back to the underlying user data. I also give a ranking of importance (i.e., how painful). Simply knowing something is painful isn’t enough for a persona. Think about the pains you face. Some, you might spend a lot of time finding solutions or avoiding them. Others, while uncomfortable, you learn to live with. Personas are the same. Lastly, while a persona could have multiple pain point statements and motivators, identifying the one the team is going to focus upon at the moment makes personas more usable because it focuses people’s energy on which problems to solve.
Link examples of how the product or feature reduces the pain or motivator (what users do now). There will always be cases where people interpret personas differently. But one way to combat this is by presenting information on how users today address the pains or motivations in the persona. A user might not do anything or they might use an alternative or competing product. This information makes the pain points and motivations in the personas more actionable because when you identify your product or feature, there’s a direct comparison point. This way, you are tying your product design process to your persona.

Additional Reading:

Have a tip on how you use personas or do you just hate them?

The Elements of Product Management

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