Let’s face it. Bringing up the topic of personas in the heat of a project kickoff can often feel as if you’re ever-so-slowly pulling up the emergency brake handle of a party bus. As the audible shriek of the brakes paralyzes everyone in earshot, Todd, the project manager and self-appointed DJ, reluctantly hits pause on his personal iPod and Jessie’s Girl comes to a halt as Brenda slides off the faux-leather seats in slow motion onto the carpeted floor peppered in Flavor Blasted Goldfish. Eyes roll and everyone awkwardly stares at you, the party killer, chaperone, and driver of a 2013 Starcraft International bus once headed toward a new e-commerce implementation that was going to make a hero of everyone onboard.
When planning a several-hundred-thousand-dollar digital product, it’s easy for tasks like personas to feel a bit...crafty. For some clients, it feels like something they’ve done before, a path their previous consultants have all led them down, and a task that has yet to really reveal any true value. Sometimes consultants go through the motion of personas just to fluff up a fancy deck and never refer to them again. And, most times, personas aren’t even truly personas, but instead proto-personas.
Regardless of how your brand arrives at the recognition that you have to build personas, trust that they are necessary and a worthwhile investment.
Real Personas vs Proto-Personas
Personas are, very simply, research. An individual persona is a summary created to represent a segment of your existing user base. It is developed through rigorous forms of both qualitative and quantitative data collection that can range from your website’s analytics to phone calls with real customers, surveys, or focus groups. There are no shortcuts here.
Personas require boots on the ground and due diligence. As the research comes in, user groups will naturally start to form and each group will get boiled down to a set of core values and assembled into fictitious individuals, each representing a slice of a website or an application’s users. Persona research is used as a tool that should inform every task-flow and feature discussion of the evolving user experience. This extends as far as brand language, tone, and even naming conventions. When done intentionally, it’s taking into account prior discussions with real people and genuinely makes them a part of the decision-making process whether they knew it or not. The output is sincere empathy, which informs the process that ultimately yields a great product/system/experience. Only with these defined personas can you factually make promises and guarantees about putting the user-first and that “we heard you and responded with X.”
Proto-personas, on the other hand, follow a similar vein but lack a rather important building block—data. Proto-personas are merely stand-ins for the real thing (to put it bluntly). They are personas created without discernible research or conversations with real users. Instead, they use prior experience and anecdotal evidence to somewhat rough in what makes the target audience tick. It’s a cardboard cutout of Tom from accounting on the party bus. It’s a nice “wish you were here” prop for group photos, but it will never be as good as the real thing.
Proto-personas can quickly be drafted in a day with a group of stakeholders (which makes them appealing), but the deliverables are based in assumption and more of a motion toward defining the user base than an action that puts in the time to capture real data. Proto-personas are budget personas.
Discipline Will Never Fail You
The truth is, I don’t want to stop the party bus either. I don’t like making personas. I’ve been doing this for years and I feel like I’ve got this. But I wouldn’t be doing myself any favors with that naïveté. Wisdom measured in time often falsely provides a sense of confidence in predicting what’s needed or what will happen next in the business of user experiences. The reality is users will always surprise you and there’s no telling which conversations may get sparked when defining a task-flow with personas at the top of mind.
“Enjoy your work and be disciplined about the parts that you don’t,” wrote David C. Baker in The Business of Expertise. This line stuck with me the second I read it, and I’ve repeated it to myself at least once a week when heading into a task I’m not looking forward to. Like me, there are probably many things you love about your daily checklist, but there are certainly things you don’t look forward to as well. I’m confidently guessing you either thought of them immediately after reading that quote or you’re thinking about them now.
When you’re disciplined about the aspects of your expertise that you don’t thoroughly love, you can find love within the discipline itself. It’s discipline that has led you to this point in your career. We know it’s a readily available tool that gets the job done, and I know few people who don’t love reaching into their toolbox for a reliable, well-worn piece of kit that’s never failed them.
Discipline will never fail you. It’s discipline that can turn a task like creating personas into something that felt like pipe cleaners and Elmer’s glue into mapping the genome of a naked mole-rat. Break the task into smaller bits and use the discipline to eat them up one by one.
When breaking down personas into smaller bits, what’s left is data that’s just waiting to be discovered—data that’s the very fuel that powers our party bus and will ultimately drive us home. When thinking about personas and whether or not they’re required, think about the data you’ll be missing out on when trying to make decisions with an empty tank. Think about being disciplined about the things you may not enjoy, and understand that discipline has never gotten you anywhere you didn’t want to go.
You may not love working out, but you’ll never regret working out.
You may not love doing your taxes, but you’ll never regret doing your taxes.
You may not love creating personas, but, I promise, you’ll never regret creating personas.
The data shows personas work. In Forrester’s report, The ROI of Personas, their return on investment model illustrates, “...while there are benefits to a redesign without personas, a redesign with personas can provide a return of up to four times more.”
Data that produces four times the return on investment hands-down makes persona research one of the most valuable tools in the business of user experience design and provides true, tangible value. Be diligent about your persona research, know they provide value, and make it a discipline that becomes the life of the party. Your work will be better for it.