The internet loves to hate on personas, but Andy Budd, co-founder of Clearleft, has a thing or two to say about that.
To be clear, Andy’s not personas’ #1 fan or anything, just a guy who thinks they’re not getting a fair shake. They’re a tool in the toolkit, like usability tests, field studies, user interviews, or feedback forms. Design personas are another tool UX designers, researchers, and product managers can use to help inform their research practice and product decisions. Like any tool, they can be used to create something amazing, or they can be used improperly.
So we got Andy on the pod to chat about the good, the bad, and the contextualized nuance of doing personas well.
Listen to the episode
Click the embedded player below to listen to the audio recording. Go to our podcast website for full episode details and transcript.
About our guest
Andy Budd is the co-founder of Clearleft, an agency that helps design leaders & hosts the UX London conference. He writes down some of his thoughts about UX and design on his blog, and is a big fan of nuance.
Design personas vs. whatever personas you have laying around
Andy hears a lot of people complain about personas. But many of them are complaining about bad experiences with personas that weren’t meant for UX or design in the first place. Many teams get stuck using inherited personas, often from marketing departments. This means they’re using a tool that was created for a totally different use case, and getting bad results because of it.
In UX and product design, design personas are the best tool for the job. Creating and using design personas is a different process than creating and using personas for other parts of the business.
Marketing personas help marketing teams understand who buyers are, where they buy, and how to craft marketing messaging for them. Design personas help designers, researchers, and product people get back to the user’s mindset when creating new solutions, features, or products. They tend to focus more on behaviors and context than demographics and other static attributes of a target audience.
👉 How do personas differ from the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework in UX Research?
Use your personas to tell stories
For Andy, the point of personas in the first place is to “breathe life into complicated research data.” Engaging teams with research data is a lot like telling a great story. Personas, for some teams, can help build the characters of that story.
Of course, if you’re boiling down all your complicated research to personas, you may be oversimplifying. Personas are a part of the larger research story, and can and should be combined with other assets over time to tell a great story.
According to Andy, great design personas outline the context behind decision making, the approaches people may take to solve problems, and the scenarios they may find themselves in.
The process is just as important as the tool
While personas can be a great tool for some teams, they may not work for others. Personas are one piece in a team’s unique and nuanced toolkit. Some teams may find them absolutely integral to building awesome user-centered stuff, while others may do just fine without them.
What’s important is that you and your team are keeping users at the center of everything you do. If personas help you do that, build great personas, and if something else helps you get there, go for that!
📚 Related reading: 54 Templates for User Personas, Jobs to Be Done & Other Mental Models
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