Here’s why you should stop using Personas
Persona building is a great way of creating empathy within your design process. Personas replaced traditional “systems thinking” methods and helped identify users of a product or service, crushing the classical era where User Roles like Bank Manager, Clerk and Administrator ruled the world.
Personas are designed to go beyond the design process and helps create empathy within the organizational culture. A persona described concisely using few sentences would look like;
Kelly is a 30 years old single mother, an M.Sc holder and works at a software company as a QA engineer. She loves traveling and hates cooking. Her dream is to become a travel blogger and she works to fulfill her dream someday.
The fundamental challenge of Personas
While persona building itself can become a real dilemma, there are fundamental challenges in getting the best out of personas.
- Your personal characteristics do not cause you to do something (behavior)
- Although there can be a strong correlation between a persona and behavior of a real person, it does not imply that such will exist in reality always
- Different people under the same Persona can behave completely differently — especially when confronted with a product or service
How Personas fail in the real world
Apple, for example, could cover a majority of its clientele with a couple of personas. So, the user journeys that they create based on the personas can vary, depending on specific needs and behavior of such personas.
The moment they try to improve a product (Apple Watch) by surveying and designing products based on Persona’s, the questions and answers they face would look like the following;
- As a single mom (Persona), how would you like us to improve our Apple Watch (Product)?
- As a person who’s concerned about your health (Persona), what do you expect from a smartwatch (Product)?
- As a grandfather (Persona), I want the Apple Watch to have a bigger display
- As another (persona), I want the watch to support my smart home system
Even if they won’t ask or answer using “As a <persona>” literally, the data collection method, data structuring and analysis will be based on these personas. Such data will be the input in a typical design process.
This leads to wrong outcomes because people who are categorized based on personas can have different jobs to be done, regardless of their age, occupation, location, status, education background and etc.
People don’t need your product because they belong to a stupid persona. They hire your product to get a job done — a job you wouldn't even know that your product would get hired for.
How JTBD can turn the game around
Kelly (our sample persona), for example, who are buying an Apple Watch, has a job to be done. That is to track the heart rate of her kid as he has a heart condition that she’s really concerned of. She only cares about the features around the watch’s heart monitor. So she hires an Apple Watch to get her job done —which is to make sure that she will instantly know if her child’s heart rate fluctuates above normal levels.
She could have hired a medical grade chest strap (heart monitor) to get the same job done. She could also have switched her workplace to come closer to the school where she would feel more comfortable. Instead, she hired an Apple Watch to get her job done.
Another person, who belongs to the same Persona, can hire the Apple Watch to get a different job done. Such as to keep her status quo maintained or to upgrade from the old watch to a more advanced one.
What matters is to identify what Job that people want to get done by hiring your product/ service.
Therefore, it’s time to stop designing products around your Personas and start by finding out “what job are they hiring your product or service for”. Because, regardless of backgrounds, age groups, statuses, and motivations, everybody is trying to get a job done.
References
Jobs-to-Be-Done — Prof. Clayton Christensen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q63PZR7mG70
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done” https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
The History of Jobs-to-be-Done and Outcome-Driven Innovation https://jobs-to-be-done.com/the-history-of-jobs-to-be-done-and-outcome-driven-innovation-a2fdfd0c7a9a
