User personas

After my time working in the industry as a product designer, I have a somewhat jaded view towards certain UX concepts like user personas and scenarios (or what they’ve evolved to become). In an academic context, I fully understand the reasoning behind constructing these models, but I am relatively unconvinced in their real-world applications.

Personas are always going to be biased. This problematic element of their nature surfaces several times even in our assigned reading — in “From User to Character,” Nielsen looks at two prominent authors in scenario-based design methods and is immediately able to render their personas as unrealistic, flat, and limited — an insight that I can wholeheartedly agree with based on the examples shared.

Yet, Nielsen’s assertion is that characters need to be far more developed and elaborate, and all these traits must be explicitly mentioned in user scenarios. He uses film scripts as an inspiration, which marks the core fallacy in his approach to me — users are real people, not fiction, which means they will encompass millions of inconsequential traits altogether, and we could never hope to represent them accurately at that scale. Each individual trait is then interpreted differently by designers, necessarily influenced by their own inherent biases. In reality, I believe fictionalizing this process to this extreme degree can be indulgent for designers but ultimately detrimental to the actual user-centered design process.

Personas and scenarios can be useful tools under certain conditions — data and research are invaluable in design, and these tools help us synthesize and transform that data into something understandable and actionable. Moreover, the greatest effectiveness of these tools lies in their ability to challenge and reshape our internal mental models, which all designers instinctively rely on — in this sense, there is a true need to consider the psychology behind our real users and expose blind spots. My concerns with these tools arise primarily from how they are often applied, rather than their fundamental nature.

I personally believe user personas should aim for the following criteria in order to be truly meaningful and effective:

• Personas should be focused on behaviors and motivations, not random personality traits, in order to minimize bias and avoid stereotypes
• Personas should be grounded in actual data and insights from real people, with a focus on what is statistically significant, rather than relying on assumptions
• Personas should be treated as archetypes, to prevent placing undue confidence in fully understanding the entire user base