Personas aren’t bad, and you’re not a bad designer for using them

With disturbing regularity, my Twitter stream seems to explode with posts demonising commonly used, yet seemingly harmless design tools. These posts take great pains to document all the ways these tools have failed people in the past (while downplaying or ignoring situation where they may have helped). Reading one of these threads you’d be forgiven for thinking these tools were actively harmful; some sort of public health nuisance this brave whistleblower was uncovering for the first time. Sadly these arguments tend to be full of misunderstandings, half truths and personal anecdotes, rather than any reasoned or measured debate. One such debate I witnessed recently revolved around Personas.

Now the love/hate debate around personas is nothing new; in fact it’s been rumbling on for some time. I personally have no great love for personas — that would be a little like loving a hammer or a chisel — but I have no great hate for them either. Personas are tools like any others, with their own relative strengths and weaknesses. So while every few months a new tool comes along claiming the previous one is now dead–in this case Jobs to be Done — I’m much more interested in developing a rich toolbox of tools to draw upon, than engaging in a Battle Royal style deathmatch. That is to say, I’m not on team persona, team JTBD, or any other team that may be having its moment in the sun. Instead I’m on team human.

Whenever the vilification of persona’s pops up its ugly head, it always goes something like this. “Personas are bad because they’re usually made up and therefore have no empirical backing”, “Personas are bad because they try and segment people and people are too unique to be segmented”, “Segmenting people is bad on principal and tantamount to discrimination”, “Personas are just a bunch of demographics and are therefor completely useless”, “Even if personas aren’t just a bunch of demographics, they are so badly used that we should just stop using them”.

While all these arguments annoy the hell out of me, the last one is the worst. The idea that because something is badly used, we should ditch it, is a blatant call for ignorance. Personally I think if something is poorly or wrongly used, it’s our responsibility as experts, craftspeople and educators, to help people…