This blog post will discuss personas. Some designers love it and some are sniffy about them. Personas are broad and very similar to knowing your audience. But then the question is if personas are a technique for user-centred design then where does it get its bad name from?
Before tracking the challenges of using personas let us understand their great benefits. Personas help out get a bigger picture and not get distracted by the raw data. As a designer, one cannot focus on individuals while developing a design idea. This is simply because individuals have diverse edges and a large population cannot be classified as homogenous. Therefore, personas are developed to save the day.
Research in design provides significant investigation to develop collaborative design environments. however, there are innumerable debates around the techniques that can benefit design. One of the techniques that have very limited research is the use of ‘personas’. This is a method for communicating user requirements and maintaining a consistent user focus in collaborative design efforts. This is effortlessly becoming increasingly widespread. Personas are fictional user archetypes based on user research. This process analyses interviews and distils them into one or multiple fictitious characters. Nonetheless, these characters are developed with realistic details and interact with the design as task scenarios.
Designers associate personas and scenarios as a role-play method that evaluates the design and challenges. As another technique personas too have a considerable debate as to their efficacy of it.
In 2006, Pruitt and Adlin published the most detailed volume of this technique called the persona lifecycle. This work focuses heavily on creating and maintaining personas through the product life cycle. Microsoft also documented short papers on personas, practice and theory by Pruitt and Grudin in 2003. Another article by Mulder- The User is Always Right: a Practical Guide for Creating and Using Personas on the Web in 2007, focuses on incorporating personas as a technique in quantitative market research. Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum(1999) provides a compelling business argument for using personas, but what it lacks is the systematic implementation of techniques.
Keeping this literature in mind the question that arises do personas provide a powerful tool for designers? Will there be a clear change in the work of designers who use personas versus the ones who don't? Another element that remains obscure is what methods are to be used to develop personas. To answer these questions it must be highlighted that for students to create personas within the project timeframe may be an additional or unwanted level of variability. Although there are challenges to this technique it must not be forgotten that the development of personas would lead to more user-centred designs. It should be a focal point that businesses operate from multiple locations, diverse stakeholders and different models. Therefore capturing different behaviours to develop a design becomes paramount. The more realistic archetypes are, they aggrandize the design process. Personas ensure a more user-based approach that facilitates constructive discussion between teams and clients.
David Marr in 1982 reminded us, of the “21/2D Sketch” concept. It is a metaphor that can be used to actively construct personas based on reasonable assumptions and not just information from the visual system. This model reminds us that it may not have user information from all sides but to try to describe it with reasonable details. Jared Spool points out “Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums.” It is the process where user research matters and not the beauty of the final artefact.
Some challenges related to developing personas are
Companies do not review and update their personas regularly which makes the existing personas redundant and also fails to meet the aim and objective of creating user personas that are to be user-centric.
Businesses sometimes when revamping their model or startups are often not sure about who their customers are and how the personas should be developed keeping in mind their business product.
While developing personas, designers at times fail to gauge both positive and negative attributes of the personas. This leads to misinformation and inaccurate availability of personas.
Personas are behaviour archetypes. Businesses often develop personas based on an immediate understanding of their product. However, the user-centred approach aims to cater to holistic components of human behaviour.
To summarise the above discussion we have seen claims and counter-claims for and against personas. What is needed is more research on the same. There are obstacles related to developing personas however using personas also requires training at the organisational level to effectively use personas in design thinking.
“People ignore design that ignores people.”
— Frank Chimero, Designer
To end this blog I quote Frank Chimero and let it open for designers to think about how personas impact their design practices.
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