Steve Portigal, an expert on ethnography and design research, just sent me an article he penned for Interactions Magazine that pans personas.  His basic argument is that personas are caricatures that limit creativity by pigeon-holing customers rather than creating more customer-centricity.

He and other design-oriented practitioners like Jason Fried at 37Signals have called personas artificial, over-used, and over-hyped.
 
We love personas at Organic, and we use the persona process on every engagement. I have tended to ignore the haters, but this is a topic that won’t seem to die.  I think it’s time to defend personas.

Many defenders of the persona process point out that personas are just a tool, and that like any tool, they can be wielded poorly.  There are plenty of flawed personas out there, but you should attack the research methods that went into a badly executed persona, not damn the persona concept in
general.

Personally, I have never thought of personas as a tool.  Personas are an artifact. And that artifact can be created by any number of means.  Ethnographic research is one such tool.  Quantitative surveys are another tool.  Interviewing product managers or customer service people within a client company are a tool.  Third party research is a tool. 

Great customer insights are generated using some triangulation of these different sources of information, and the outcome of that triangulation, at least at Organic, is the persona artifact.  The persona artifact encapsulates and synthesizes everything you learned from applying your research tools.

To me the form factor of that artifact is a design decision which should suit the context of the client engagement.  It could be a paper doll, sure, but in the past we have developed video montages, physical spaces that represent where a persona lives, a women’s purse and all its associated contents. Each of these executions created an empathetic touchstone for the team to rally around.

There is no question in my mind from dozens of engagements that (well-crafted) personas:
(a) develop empathy for the customer in the design team
(b) help us as consultants better understand the nature of the business problem that our clients are facing
(c) create more customer-centric relationships between our clients about their end-users

Maybe where more design-oriented practitioners have a problem with
personas is in the way that advertising agencies have appropriated what
was a design methodology and made it their own.

The insights required to create meaningful
experiences for marketing communications are different than might be
required to, for example, design a new breakfast food or a cell phone. 

One the one hand, the requirements are much more shallow in
advertising- we know who buys phones and large, we know where, the
product attributes are defined.  On the other hand, the tools we have
at our disposal are much richer in advertising than in design. There is
a whole research industry devoted to parsing customers tastes,
attitudes, media habits, etc.  Moreover, the clients themselves
typically have a strong understanding of key aspects of their
customers’ behavior when it comes to product acceptance, market
segmentation, buying habits etc. 

If advertisers don’t talk to customers enough, design in entirely too
reliant on first-person research.  Where is the understanding of how a
particular product fits into the overall business environment? What
about competitive analysis?  Market sizing?  As the old saw goes,
nobody ever asked for an iPod in a focus group.

I’d like to see
less posturing from the design community about purity in the design
process, particularly that great designs are truly user-centered and
somehow beyond the base world of commerce.  Advertisers feel no qualms
about manipulating customer behavior.  They want to understand what
makes a customer tick in order to drive particular behaviors. Designers
do the same thing, but they just won’t admit to it.  A great design is
great because it creates desire, not because it is somehow uplifting to
the human spirit.

Misha Cornes