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Personas: wasteful or helpful? Your thoughts?
Aug 29, 2007
In this recent post I suggested that "personas" - profiles of theoretical customers - are no substitute for actually talking to actual real-live people who are prospective or current customers.
A good customer experience is built on knowledge of customers, not imagined people who we'd like to be our customers.
I know personas are a hot topic in the user experience community, so I was interested to see the feedback on the column.
Quoting readers...
Negative opinions of personas:
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"I agree with your take on personas. I am working on project after project where 'personas' are created based on assumptions, market research and 3rd party research but no primary research. Not to mention project after project with no usability testing. Apparently there isn't enough time or money. It seems a lot of folks talk about user-centered design but very few actually do it."
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"I've worked with companies that have spent buckets of money for consulting firms to develop these 'personas.' As a marketing professional I find them useless and as a person I find them insulting. People are far too complex to fit into neat little categories. Instead, why not focus on universal needs and how your product can meet those needs? And yes, use those buckets of money to talk to your customers first-hand to find out how you can make things better."
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...and on the other hand...
Positive opinions:
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"While I find talking to consumers invaluable, I still think that a well-shaped persona (based on that research) is critical in terms of knowing who you're talking to. As a writer by training, I know it's much more effective to visualize a single person that you're writing to than to focus on, as a whole, the 12 individual consumers you sat down with previously."
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"One small quibble... Personas, when done correctly, are actually helpful summaries of all the research you've done with actual customers (contextually in their homes even). In other words, if you're finding yourself talking about 'invented personas,' then you're not really in the persona world, where every detail about the persona is grounded in researched information. Chances are if you're talking about invented personas, you're moving from marketing profiles to imagined users, and, as you say, that's not quite there -- almost, but not quite!"
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What do you think?
Post your comment here, on the original post.
