Being a supporter of the value of personas to product teams, I sometimes underestimate that misconceptions and low UX maturity about its prime goal – a decision-making tool to align product to user needs and goals – can be a deal-breaker.

Making a persona effort within a company is usually better said than done. 

The term persona comes in different flavors, and UX maturity considerably impacts communicating its value across team members and stakeholders.

What the hell is a persona

It’s a specific representation of a target user. It enables product teams to design for people who are not like them. An image speaks for a thousand words… some templates

What’s not a persona

A general, one size fits all target user, a broad description of a target group that does not allow a product team to make product decisions. I.e. car owners, citizens, employees, drivers, cyclists… 

So why do we need personas?

  1. To stop making general assumptions about target users and thus making uninformed decisions about what makes our users tick.
  2. To focus the design(experience design) on specific target users that bring the most value. As opposed to – we are designing for everybody, and whatever we create will work just fine.
  3. To create empathy across-company with our users. Keeping in mind that our users are not (like) us.

Suppose we are lucky enough (hard work and a lot of convincing) to communicate the value of personas as a User-Centered Design method. In that case, the next step is to jump-start a persona effort in a few days or weeks (depending on context).

Let’s focus on the 1st step – Persona planning.

1st we need to gather a core team to help the persona effort across the company 

  • The key here is having a diverse group from product to marketing to sales. So it’s relevant to have a group small but broad enough to make an organizational introspection.
  • Get updated user research and data sources that will provide the raw material for your personas.

This team will possibly uncover some big dilemmas like:

  • How user-centered is the company
  • How do people think about users
  • How user information is incorporated into product design

One of the biggest challenges at this initial stage is not having data avaliable\up to date\usable to start building data-driven personas.

In this scenario, we should immediately place a strategy to support user research within the user base and identify data sources(quantitative and qualitative) to allow the team to learn about our users from data, not internal assumptions.

At this stage arises the biggest threat to a valuable, helpful, and meaningful persona effort – building and sticking to Ad-hoc\Proto personas.

What is this a (vicious) Ad-hoc\Proto Persona?

It’s an internal sketch made from internal assumptions about users. The takeaway here is that we are not using actual data from users to build personas. Instead, we are using what we think we know about our users… what we think and reality can be very distinct worlds.

Is there any value in starting with Proto Persona personas?

It depends.

It mostly depends on whether the team embraces this as 1st initial step and is genuinely interested in understanding more about their users.

If the team relies solely on these assumption-based types, it will probably lead to bad decisions.

Still, there can be some benefits:

  1. It helps stakeholders understand the need for user-centered design products/services.
  2. Streamline the product-related communication.
  3. It can move the discussion further as different assumptions surface, and the need for a shared definition of the target audience naturally arises.
  4. Provide some practice with persona conception before creating real and specific personas.

…. but the main benefit is helping field research validate or contradict current impressions and internal assumptions.

The quick path for creating Ad-Hoc personas can be quite fast

  1. Identify participants for a 2 to 4-hour workshop
  2. Clarify business and user experience goals
  3. Identify current language to describe categories of users
  4. Do assumption-gathering sticky notes exercise
  5. Identity skeletons
  6. Prioritize skeletons

Alternatives to workshops are doing this exercise asynchronously or using questionnaires.

The hard truth is 

Rolling a product without genuinely knowing our users is risky as it hinders product value and impact.

The other hard truth is

Ad-Hoc personas are not effective for challenging internal assumptions. for that, we need data. and to get data, you need to embrace your users. So…

Let’s leave our office spaces and go out into the wild, embracing our users in their context – hopefully, in that process, we no longer need vicious Proto Personas.