
Kill Your Personas - ohjeez
https://medium.com/microsoft-design/kill-your-personas-1c332d4908cc
======
erikpukinskis
Personas always seemed like the worst of the standard UI design practices.

For one thing, they seem to usually just be an amalgam of cringey stereotypes
or cringey attempts to invert stereotypes.

And look at the alternatives to personas:

A) Use your own head and think about what you would want. Use yourself as the
persona

B) Use an actual living user. Ask a person

It just seems like in almost every situation one of those two is going to
serve you better than a persona.

I do like the suggestion in the article of doing persona spectrums instead.
Neat idea.

~~~
HillRat
Generally, using yourself as a user proxy for most applications will be
_worse_ than using personas, unless you’re part of the core user base. Doing
user-focused research and road-testing prototyping against users is critical,
but impractical during the detailed define and design phase. So personas are
an imperfect compromise, but a compromise that works well as long as you keep
its pitfalls in mind.

Our practice is to define a taxonomy of user types that map to quantitatively-
defined archetypes, with personas developed qualitatively to draw out specific
motivations and viewpoints uncovered during ethnography. It sounds like the
MSFT team got to archetypes and then dropped stock photos and a description on
top of them, which isn’t unusual but is definitely not good practice. You
can’t just create an “average user” and call it a day, because you need to
encompass a pretty broad set of behaviors, intents, capabilities, and needs.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> Generally, using yourself as a user proxy for most applications will be
> worse than using personas, unless you’re part of the core user base

I disagree. Part of training to be a designer is developing the skill of
empathy. You learn to live with users in your body.

Arguably, this is the most fundamental skill of design and the primary way the
profession functions at all.

I think your suggestion that you can somehow model users in your frontal lobe
as “the other” and get something more accurate is not correct.

~~~
HillRat
I get where you’re coming from, but I’d argue that design requires both formal
and embodied empathy — personas let you manage the complexity around a
multiplicity of viewpoints, whereas embodied empathy (informed by ethnography)
gives you the ability to understand those viewpoints at a visceral level.
Every design choice means tradeoffs between user desires, so personas are
useful for “lensing” those decisions and ensuring that everyone gets an equal
(albeit virtual) seat at the table during description and definition phases
(just as actual users get their seats during prototyping and UAT).

Having said that, I know some designers are downplaying personas or even omit
them entirely (at the risk of Alan Cooper rising from the sea to take his
vengeance on them), so I’d be curious to know your experience in working
without an archetype net for clients, especially with journey maps and similar
high-level deliverables. There’s nothing sacrosanct in the discipline, and if
we can find better ways to get to the end state faster, so much the better for
all of us!

~~~
erikpukinskis
Can you explain more what you mean by lensing and the equal seats at the
table?

~~~
HillRat
Sure! “Lensing” is just analyzing the effects of a design decision from the
viewpoint of each identified type/archetype/persona. You can do it informally
through think-aloud protocols, or through more formal tools like interaction
tables or multifocal journey maps (which get hard to manage!).

For example, if you’re designing a healthcare experience, you might stop at a
critical journey point and fan out a set of archetypes —- say, physician,
patient, nurse, and back-office employee. You walk through how this decision
affects them functionally, then dive into the personas to explore emotional
and PoV effects, using standard tools like affinity diagrams, roleplaying,
emotion mapping, and so on. Once you’ve made a choice, or deadlocked on a set
of choices, you can formalize the effects with an interaction table or
narrative descriptions, and now you have an artifact that you can refer to
elsewhere in the define/design phases, and that forms a basis for user stories
during delivery.

All of this is basically to help create a kind of virtual roundtable that
represents different users’ POVs when it’s not practical to involve them face
to face. It also, I’ve found, sometimes lets us intercept usability and design
problems that the users themselves might not be able to articulate or, for
personal or political reasons, be unwilling to —- which is where your point
about “living with the users in your body” is so critical! I completely agree
that if you can’t embody a persona, it’s just a useless (or even harmful!)
poster on the wall.

