I don't like personas. That's the title.

I’m going to preface this piece: this is my personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.

During my bachelor's program, we were encouraged to develop personas. We used random Google image searches to find the perfect generic Stock Image person to represent our ideal "user." We built these characters' shopping preferences, their likes, their fears, their lifestyles, all into a neatly displayed one-pager.

As a student, I thought that personas were going to be essential to my career. As a professional now, I see that personas are oversimplified, Frankenstein-like versions of users supposedly used to represent the different groups of people who may or may not interact with our products and/or services.

Personas are good as an educational tool when it comes to teaching designers-in-training how to incorporate the needs of people into their design. They're excellent training wheels for taking what you have learned about the population of people you're trying to work with, but that is really about it.

Google Images searched example

I have seen organizations use personas as a tool to represent the stigmatized experiences of populations of people without doing the research to understand people's authentic experiences. The bias comes through, and...I hate to say it.... so does a lot of the institutionalized racism.

I was speaking with a mentor of mine about this, and he had a great example of this in action: in some work here in Canada, Ministry-facing teams will create personas of Indigenous persons that grossly oversimplify their lived experiences in an attempt to justify some new product being launched to "tick the Indigenous inclusion box."

Another lesson in how imagination-generated personas can cause more harm than good comes from Kellogg’s first attempt to enter the market in Southeast Asia. They assumed (and you know what happens when you assume...) that the average Indian consumer was the same as an American consumer; Kellogg's ignored the key cultural differences, such as breakfast habits, ingredient preferences, and shopping behaviour. The result was a cultural misfire: Indians found cold, sugary cornflakes unappetizing, and on the whole incompatible with their mental schema for what breakfast should be. Only after conducting real user research, adapting flavors, and relaunching did Kellogg’s begin to succeed in India.

In both cases, the personas were not “stand-ins” backed by research—they were assumptions masquerading as understanding.

When I am mentoring students, I oftentimes tell them that personas are a waste of their time (unless, of course, it is mandatory for their grades). I preach how understanding how to do proper design research and better understand people's authentic experience, struggles, and wins are far more important than the superficial research and guesswork often behind persona building. This means taking the time (and money) to recruit, schedule, and interview a diverse group of participants representing the people for whom you're designing.

I have only seen personas used well once in my career: I was working on a project that was trying to understand how marginalized individuals navigated a certain system that was not designed to support them. We did a whole bunch of interviews representing a wide range of individuals and then began to synthesize what we learned.

As a deliverable, we created narratives representing the real experiences we heard from the interviews, grouped by the different buckets of marginalized and racialized experiences. The difference here is that we used these narratives to help socialize these people's experience with the powers-that-be in order to secure programs and funding to support those featured in the narratives. They weren't caricatures from our imaginations and a brief Google search; they were research-backed.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, sure a well-researched persona is better than an imagined persona; but it is my personal belief that a persona doesn't accomplish anything most of the time.

Your research belongs in the work itself, not in a persona.

TL;DR I strongly dislike personas because they often waste time and prevent genuine understanding of people. Just talk to people, listen to their needs, and represent their real experiences. It is that simple.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

Thanks so much!

Caleigh O.