In 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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