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The problem with personas
You Can Probably Guess Where I’m Going With This.
I have a love-hate relationship with design.
On one hand, when approached thoughtfully, I think it could be the most useful way to solve the world’s biggest problems we all face today (not to mention, it has also helped me pay rent over the past decade).
On the other, it has started to fall into the same trap many overhyped disciplines face — it’s becoming a caricature of itself.
Don’t believe me? Just look at CrossFit, tech entrepreneurship, or any other popular fad and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
When something becomes popular on a worldwide scale, something starts to happen:
A language forms around it.
People who practice this discipline start to make up, adopt, and bastardize words of their own in order to either:
- Appear smarter than they really are (i.e. establish credibility)
- Make non-practitioners feel stupid (i.e. establish themselves as an expert)
- Make sense of the nonsensical (i.e. what most of us are trying to do in life)
There is one design word/tool I feel most conflicted about above all others (and no, it’s not “users” — this is another post for another time).
In this case, I have a bone to pick with one of the most popular design devices there is:
Personas
If you are a non-designer and have no idea what I’m talking about, let me try to break it down without sounding pretentious.
Personas are basically fictional characters that represent a broader group of potential users (ugh, there’s that word) who might use something you’re designing in a specific way.
Now, if you read that and automatically thought, “Hm…personas sound an awfully lot like stereotypes,” then you would be correct and you would also have called out the main problem with personas (hence the title of this post).
Personas can be extremely valuable when designing with multiple groups of humans in mind, but they are inherently reductive and, if used carelessly, can easily lead to the creation…
