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.
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
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Strategists & Planners
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Brilliant post Misha!
Regarding your last point, I think great design can, does and should do both a) create desire and b) uplift the human spirit.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Look at BMW, Harley Davidson, Apple, ...
Posted by David Feldt
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January 25, 2008 8:00 PM
Posted on January 25, 2008 20:00
Misha-fantastic insight. I cant imagineing not using personas either! Perhaps smaller clients can justify 1to1 marketing but the only way to get the message across a large organization with multiple stakeholders is via personas!
Posted by Mark Goldstein-Loyalty Lab | January 28, 2008 9:34 AM
Posted on January 28, 2008 09:34
David-
Maybe I am being too cynical about the possibility of uplifting the human spirit through design :) I guess I have been thinking of all the talk around "design for sustainability" - seems like every design conference includes it these days. It seems to be that putting new products into the world is inherently un-green. But you're right- a great design can certainly delight and maybe even uplift a spirit of two...
Mark, totally agree that personas are an essential tool to communicate the why to a large client organization.
Posted by Misha Cornes
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February 4, 2008 11:37 AM
Posted on February 4, 2008 11:37