Stop overcomplicating your personas and start prototyping more

A screen-capture of a Google search of UX Persona

Being aware of who we are designing for, rather than unwittingly coming with design solutions is at the heart of user-centered design. While Personas can help us maintain that awareness, project teams often lack the budget, time, and research power required to build them. This article is not, yet another article about how useful Personas are, but rather a more flexible approach to learn from your users.

Personas can be one of the UX double-edged swords. Well executed, they enable product teams, and stakeholders to become user-centered. Poorly executed, they become yet another door to let more friction in and to question the UX practice and its value.

Brief

Personas are a tool, a guide. Personas can help us answer: what our users would expect? How would they feel? What would delight them? What are their pain points?

The Problem

Personas are not an end and are not set in stone. They also require a strategic approach to put them to use, using the right tools, such a journey map to convey their current or ideal journey, their communication is critical, and this is where often personas fail.

If you have been in the trenches for a while, you likely have your own stories about Personas. Some are probably going like this:

• PROJECT PARTNER: We need Personas, when can we have them to start our design efforts? We are starting our design and development efforts in three weeks.
• Researcher or responsible *thinks*: I wish I could ignore all my other projects to deliver personas based on research, facts, and data, but also the entire idea of empathizing with our users is that the team gets involved in the process.

• PROJECT PARTNER: What format can we use to create the personas?
• We can use whatever we want, a neat and slick slide, or a simple google document. Of course the end-product matters, but as long as we deliver a good snapshot and take the time to communicate these the right way, the format is just a medium, not the problem.

• PROJECT PARTNER: We will begin development of “feature X” in the next two weeks. We need to create a persona for this feature
• Unless our audience has changed, why do we need a new persona?

If we start creating Personas for every single feature, you are going to end up with an encyclopedia of hundreds of personas, difficult to track, remember, and reference at every opportunity.

Having a snapshot of who your personas are vs. writing a book of each of them is more useful for fast-paced agile teams. We question personas with being too general or missing attributes, but having too much it also adds complexity and it can become overwhelming in the design decision process.

The use of personas is a team effort. Their communication and use should not fall into the wheelhouse of a UX researcher, the designer, or the product manager alone. Hence, joining forces is crucial.

Product teams need to be involved in the research process. Researchers should recruit people with attributes similar to the personas and present findings in their context.

As a designer, keeping personas present in your design workflow but also introducing your personas in every proposed solution is critical. In doing this, the chances of getting buy-in behind the reasons of your prototypes will increase. Being user-centered doesn’t happen naturally by just having a snapshot of your persona in your project folder.

Personas are potent tools; however, they can become obsolete. In reality, personas should evolve. Your users will have new pain points as they start to use your products, or you are probably not solving existing pain points.

As a product owner, if you have done some research, you probably have an idea of who your audience is, and what pain points your users have. At least what your assumptions are, so rather than investing too much defining your personas, start working with your team in prototyping different solutions and learn from them.

Thoughts: How many personas were created to design the wall outlet below on the right?

On the left: A meme from an unknown source on the web. On the right: A wall outlet with shelf on Amazon

If you don’t have the muscle, budget and time to conduct the research and gather data to build your personas, you can at least approach a group of potential users, and start prototyping ideas that could help solve their problems, or what you assume those are.

The democratization of technology has made it possible for anyone to build, and test prototypes with an audience in ways that were not previously possible, especially for people on a budget. You can take the guesswork out of design decisions by validating them with real users in hours.

Suggested approach for small teams on a budget

• Early on your project or at any point if you haven’t done it, recruit five to seven people with a mix of background, gender, and experiences of those you think are your ideal target.
• Interview, summarize your findings and create a snapshot of four personas. You don’t need a persona for every single feature
• Decide a few scenarios where you identified problems and opportunities
• Prototype: start small, you can build an end-to-end prototype experience to sense with your users, as long as you focus on scenario-based tasks and present how this solution will solve the problems defined above
• Test your prototype with a small group of people with similar attributes to the personas you created: don’t worry too much about having a perfect prototype; or that your persona checks all attributes, make sure you have defined what do you want to learn from your users and prototypes
• Summarize your findings: sense the impact the idea had on your users, and respond to that in new prototypes
• Rinse and Repeat: the entire purpose of testing, is learning.

Don’t let your persona die in dumb ways. Source: Giphy.com — Dumb ways to die

Conclusion

• If you have the muscle, budget, and time to invest on your personas strategy early on, keep in mind, they evolve, and continuous conversations should happen to reflect the behaviours, needs, and goals of your users in their time.
• If you don’t have the budget, and you can afford not investing in personas, test more often, what are your user behaviours? Test again, have you changed the outcome? Measure and collect your evidence. Are we moving the needle? What did you learn?

The goal is to have continued conversations with a representation of your users, to get a sense of your ideas, vs. spending time in creating a perfect picture of that John Doe and what their age, gender, race, occupation, income, location, and hobbies are.