The positive impact of accommodating potential users and their needs when developing new products is as logical1 as proven2 . However, organizations still struggle to adapt user-centric principles to practices.
Over the last thirty years, one method emerged to demonstrate user-centricity: the persona. Personas are a set of fictional characters that represent stereotypical users and user behaviors. They usually have a name, a nice photo, socio-demographic information, goals and motivations. They should help teams focus on specific scenarios rather than design for everyone.
As a UX designer and strategy consultant, I have seen many of them. And also see how easily they can become ineffective. Here's how that happens.
Alan Cooper is considered (and considers himself) the father of the persona. In 1998, he first formalized the method of "pretend users" as a "necessary foundation of good interaction design"3 . Personas should be as concrete as possible, following a mantra of "shooting for believability, not diversity"4 so that everyone involved shares the same mental image of the user they're creating for.
But for Cooper, personas don't appear out of nowhere. They emerge as observations from extensive user research. Cooper mentions thirty: Thirty user interviews would be boiled down to approximately ten personas. The dev process would then focus on just one single persona's needs5 .
That's because his persona was a method to counter "scope creep" (the bloating of requirements in ongoing projects) and to focus resources on optimizing single features. His personas were a method to mediate between development and management in favor of the dev team.
Excuse my excursion into the history of the persona, but when we talk about them today, these contextual traits – extensive research and mediating force – are completely forgotten6 . Instead, experts & template providers are undercutting each other with how little effort it takes to create actionable personas7 .
This leads us to the actual culprit: the "ad hoc persona" – created within a 15 to 30-minute timeframe, without preceding research but from personal experience (we're all humans, after all). It was also once well-intentioned: instead of formal personas, requirements could be contextualized “ad hoc” by designers to create empathy for understanding the need for a feature8 .
Today, the activity is often introduced with the words "usually, creating personas takes longer, but for today, this will do". Unfortunately, it won't do. The ad hoc situation is a breeding ground for misleading assumptions when teams without previous UX and design experience idealize their users, treat those they cannot relate to with cynicism or simply reproduce implicit prejudices.
Since nothing lasts as long as the temporary solution, these misleading workshop personas eventually find their way – without re-evaluation – into the actual design process. And set the yet-to-be-built product up to fail right from the beginning.
This brings us back to the initial statement: user-centricity is part of almost every organizational strategy. Yet, teams continuously compromise on the most important part (in favor of cutting corners and effort): honestly understanding their users.
About the Crystal Ball magazine
Crystal Ball is the accompanying magazine for the R&D and Future of News fellowships funded by Media Lab Bavaria in 2024. All fellows were asked to contribute a text about their project and a glimpse into the future.
