Personas Non Grata

A short pet peeve post.  A software-development aeon ago, Alan Cooper created a great tool for communication between disciplines in software development projects; Personas.  All software disciplines now had a common language with which to frame design-based decisions. These short, genericized descriptions of the target users for a given product allow conversations like, “that’s an appealing feature, but Anna (persona name) wouldn’t really need that as much as this other feature.”  Since both sides of this conversation have familiarized themselves with the Anna persona, agreements can often be reached quickly and more effectively.  So why is this useful tool falling out of favor / use?

Where this appears to me to have broken down is actually in the UX Design Team itself.  Personas are NOT a tool for the Design team, but a tool created BY the Design team, for other disciplines.  When the design team themselves come to view their users as Personas, they abdicate the main added value of designers to product creation. Designers are user proxies, representing the user to the product team.  By developing and fostering an empathetic relationship to their users’ needs, state of mind, feelings and motivations, Designers can better devise pathways, affordances, prioritized hierarchies, and punctual delightful experiences, that carry the user as effortlessly as possible through to their goals. Then, through the judicious use of Personas they can evangelize these priorities to the rest of the project team.

Empathic UX brings a new lens with which to use existing tools and can lead to user insights that designers would not normally come to from only a shared, but surface, understanding of those user Personas.  Only by cultivating a deeper understanding of what makes our users tick can UX Designers achieve a fully-realized UX Design. Personas leveraged for their full, albeit more limited, benefits.