Fear and Loathing in Las Personas
by Todd WilkensIn the newest issue of Interactions magazine, Steve Portigal laments the use of personas. His point essentially is that personas “invite misuse” and therefore they should be avoided. Peter has responded, pointing out that Steve has thrown a baby or two out with the bath water by conflating personas with poorly conceived personas. To some degree it becomes a war of analogies, with Steve saying personas are like guns (i.e. inviting misuse and dire consequences) and Peter saying they are like movies (i.e. just because most are bad doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the activity of movie-making).
But neither of them addresses the underlying issue that is at the heart of all this fear and loathing, use and misuse. The power and danger of personas is their realism. Good personas use this realism to drive authentic understanding deep into the heart of an organization. As humans, we are highly attuned to observing, interpreting, and relating to other people. Good personas take advantage of this tendency and focus it on “people” that are highly relevant to a design, business, or engineering task. I have seen this have profound positive effects on organizations.
The issue is that personas are not real. They are realistic but, in the end, fictional. Knowing Steve, I can say that he is very uncomfortable with that element of fiction because of how it can affect the people creating and using personas. When handled poorly, organizations can begin (or continue) to talk about real people as characters or stereotypes. And that, as he would probably say, “freaks him out.” As it should. We all hate to see organizations misunderstanding the people they are trying to serve.
But does this potential really outweigh the benefits? In my experience, personas have always improved an organizations understanding of their customers because, if nothing else, they become a tangible and explicit artifact for focusing and catalyzing discussion about customers. While this may not always be inspiring, it moves things forward. Incremental change is better than no change at all.
Of course, Steve’s essay also raises an important question, what is the alternative to personas? (Peter makes this same point.) If we agree that qualitative, contextual, and in-depth research is important and necessary, how do we capture and communicate the things we learn in the field beyond giving people a mountain of raw video and audio to go through for themselves? (Assuming that video and audio actually substitutes for being in the field…). Steve says that we should “tell stories.” But every story told is an approximation. Details are left out or reordered to support a larger theme or message. This is true in journalism as much as in romance or sci-fi. In the same way, some level of fiction is necessary when it comes to personas. Personas are meant to represent archetypical customers or users of a product or service. Representing archetypes requires a certain level of aggregation and synthesis.
In my whole career, I have seen few things that inspire strong reactions like personas. Enthusiasm & excitement as well as fear and loathing. So, I can’t fault Steve for his strong reaction. Personas blur the line between truth and fiction, which can be disconcerting. But this all highlights the fact that personas are more a medium of communication than a tool. So, Steve’s gun analogy isn’t really appropriate. Peter’s movie analogy is better. Or consider painting, which actually had/has a movement called Realism. I think it’s a mistake to throw out the idea of painting or of Realism just because someone’s first attempt looks more like a toddler’s scrawl than a Rembrandt.
P.S. Congrats to Steve for such a provocative first column!
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January 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Nicely balanced post, Todd.
I’ve been thinking that “telling the story” is a strong vehicle for injecting information into our clients’ brains, yet it is so informal/ephemeral. When I review a mental model with the client team (or set of mental models, corresponding to different audience segments/personas), it’s really a story-telling session, and whoever is not at that review meeting misses out. The stories I tell have to do with things we heard from different participants, which are captured in the model. These stories are real, not fictional, but the models represent sets of participants, or if you’d like to call them this, personas. Videos and cartoons are strong methods of telling stories; can you make a video of a montage of participants and have it tell a story? Probably. That might formalize the “storytelling.”
January 19th, 2008 at 6:09 am
personas are a tool, and like any other tool can be used poorly. to me, they’re a great way of communicating the essence of a segmentation architecture when done right. i think the key is that they have to come from real insights, ideally a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. i see a lot of designers just pull them out of thin air, which is a very dangerous practice.
the other challenge is to make personas actionable, ideally to as many business functions as possible: design, R&D, marketing, sales, etc. that takes a lot of work and insight as to how different people communicate, learn, and work, but they can be an incredibly powerful tool if you can figure that out.
one thing that i really don’t care for with personas is writing cheesy stories with fake names like “mike is a 25 year old accountant that enjoys biking and long walks on the beach.” that makes them feel really phony to me, so i prefer to use personas as a way of capturing archetypes that represent a particular segment like “the adventursome accountant” or whatever.
anyway, good discussion- thanks!
January 20th, 2008 at 5:09 am
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January 21st, 2008 at 2:27 am
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January 21st, 2008 at 2:40 am
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January 21st, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Thank you for this great post. I have to admit that I often have difficulties with user personas as well, not so much with the actual concept (the idea itself is great) but with the way I have seen it executed so often. As Finn stated, they are often more like shallow characters from soap operas than characters you would be likely to meet in real life.
What usually kills it for me though is when such personas are used in user scenarios - “Jim calls up the web site and it amazed by the variety of services. He downloads a song in no time and spends the rest of his day praising the site to his colleagues.” That’s just sad… but I am sure you have encountered that stuff as well.
I would rather prefer to see a persona as an expression of a mind set than as an elaborate setting or scenario for following discussions. Maybe the word “persona” is what I am really struggling with.
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
There was a long tail-chasing discussion about this on the IxDA list a month or two ago. One difficulty in discussing the merits of personas is that nobody seems to be able to define what a good persona looks like or how it should be used. They variably are used to communicate the target audience, inform functionality, inform the experience, justify designs (probably their most potentially dangerous use), etc, and without knowing the usage context I don’t see how they can be reliably judged. Depending on what and with whom you are communicating they could be better or worse than an alternative representation. I agree with Peter’s challenge, but the purpose of the tool needs to be defined in order to find the answer. While we shouldn’t abandon movie-making because most movies suck, we also shouldn’t make a movie when a poem or Powerpoint would be more effective.
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:27 am
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April 5th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
[…] adaptive path blog: Todd Wilkens: Fear and Loathing in Las Personas Todd’s smart commentary on the tradeoffs, power, and risks of personas as part of the research and design process The search for a metaphor for persona design (guns? movies? safety scissors?) goes on. Tags: none « Making the familiar unfamiliar, or traveling the continuum of appetizing-ness Movin’ on up, 2008 » EMail This Post var blogTool = “WordPress”; var blogURL = “http://www.portigal.com/wp”; var blogTitle = “All This ChittahChattah”; var postURL = “http://www.portigal.com/blog/chittahchattah-quickies-180/”; var postTitle = “ChittahChattah Quickies”; var commentAuthorFieldName = “author”; var commentAuthorLoggedIn = false; var commentFormID = “commentform”; var commentTextFieldName = “comment”; var commentButtonName = “submit”; No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> […]