This series of posts are thoughts and responses to the Designing for Usability course at Parsons School of Design.
Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members by Nielsen Norman Group
This article has been excellent in explaining the roles personas play throughout the design process, guiding the reader on what to look out for when creating them, as well as cautioning how personas can be misinterpreted and misapplied.
As someone who had to communicate abstract concepts before, I have found metaphors, personification, and analogies really powerful in encapsulating and concretizing those abstract concepts in ways that people can readily understand. Once well packaged in a communication vehicle, others can then communicate those concepts to others. It makes sense to call personas by name, and talk about these personas and associated behaviors and attitudes when designing for a larger audience exhibiting the same behaviors and attitudes.
One of the (many) things I am wary of doing in my user research so far is to over-generalize or draw patterns too quickly. While I have attempted to create personas before, I was skeptical because then, I did not have a large sample size with which to create distinct personas from, and I felt like I was making things up and building a product around assumptions rather than real needs.
Why Personas Fail by Nielsen Norman Group
This article addressed some of reasons why personas fail in providing value as a tool in the design process. They may fail because:
- leadership assumes too much about their customers;
- stakeholders have personas forced upon them without understanding or confidence that they represent their target users;
- stakeholders don’t know how they work or don’t think they’ll work;
- personas created are not aligned with the goals.
Looking back at my earlier skepticism on personas, it could have been points above. I felt that the length of time spent observing my users was too short, and was wary of jumping to conclusions as no interviews were conducted.
