3 Ways UX Personas can Fall Short
Personas. A tool in a toolbox, a resource, a baseline for understanding users — but what ARE personas, and do they highlight unnecessary generalizations? No doubt, the idea of personas is prevalent in the field of user experience. Take a look at the syllabus of any UX Bootcamp and you’ll find it listed, have a chat with any UX-inspired Product Manager and they’ll ask for it.
Personas are a fantastic tool to use as a source of truth for understanding a user base. They are living documents being refreshed throughout time. And they are a reminder of who we are building for. Some may use the word empathy to describe what personas can create.
I want to talk about 3 reasons why I think personas can fall short.
1. Persona research can be sloppily executed
If we interview 5, even 10 people that are part of our user base and create personas from these interviews, we are missing an opportunity for breadth and depth of research. How can we investigate our user base with more rigor? How can we apply secondary research to our persona creation? What about data? Have we considered how to quantify some of our learnings or how to identify behaviour patterns at scale? Do not forget about the research methods we have in our toolbox.
When crafting personas, we often explain that these are representations of our user base. But do not be fooled — what we are creating could be more of a lean or proto persona based on assumptions or existing knowledge. And for a lot of us, a proto persona could be a perfectly suitable place to start. Keep in mind that it is imperative we communicate this tool to the audience of our personas in a way that everyone can understand how to apply the knowledge being provided. “These are ideas so that we can align on our assumptions and kickstart our research, they are not representations of our user base.”
2. Fluff is distracting
It is fun to see that you imagined one of our personas is a single mother with a dog named Scruffy and a knack for crocheting, but what does this add to our persona? I often see this with personas lacking research. Maybe we only have a few insights and so we start adding filler fluff. But unless someone’s relationship status or dog or hobby is representative of our users and relevant to our product (and this has been validated) — don’t include the fluff, it only distracts from the important insights that we’ve collected. And if our personas are looking a bit sparse, we can consider doing further research.
“Oh, but Scruffy the dog creates empathy,” you might say. No, it creates humanity, but this should be the job of our research findings, not a make-belief detail. If we are looking to create empathy, why not hold a viewing party for our user tests instead (for example)?
3. Generalizations are presented as truth.
I believe that personas have the potential to perpetuate bias. When we add an image or a caricature to our personas, who chooses what they look like? What implications might these visualizations have for our userbase? Perceived gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, height, tech proficiency, etc. all of these details can open up that persona to the unconscious biases of the persona’s audience.
Take this example: A medical software company creates personas. One persona is supposed to represent nurses. The image and text show: a white woman named Stacy in her late 50s wearing Disney-themed scrubs. You can see her, right? Of course you can! Maybe this represents the majority of the userbase. But what about everyone else? What about the male nurses? What about every other age bracket? What about nurses of colour? What about any other combination?
Now, when stakeholders are reviewing this persona — they may be thinking to themselves “nurses are always women who love fun scrubs who began working when documents were mostly paper and pencil” which, you can start to imagine, will skew how they perceive their userbase and how they interact with users in the future. This is a very simplistic example to demonstrate the point.
I think that personas are complex and represent a variety of people. Since images (and even persona names) can trigger bias, why not use non-human images that attempt to avoid this altogether? For example, we can use robots or animals if we must add some kind of image. Or we can show the tools the persona typically uses instead. Be creative! Then, include validated information such as: we find that this persona is 40% male and 60% female in our userbase as of [date]… if we think this will bring value.
Now, of course, there are products that may serve a specific characteristic. It is up to us, as researchers, to include these details when valuable, but find other ways of representation when such details are not fixed.
In Conclusion
Let’s be aware of the implications our personas have, communicate their purpose well, and ensure we are not overly generalizing a group of users.
