The Persona Non Grata article is a gift. Really.
By Tamara Adlin - Posted February 26th, 2008 in Personas
Bad, bad blogger. It’s been far too long since my last underpants entry. And what jolted me out of my blog lethargy? You guessed it. The ongoing fracas from that Persona Non Grata article in Interactions magazine by Steve Portigal. The one where he says personas suck. And that we should find other ways to communicate what we know about users, like, for example, stories.
Here’s the deal…he’s got a great point, and I actually kinda furiously like the article because it reflects what annoys me about persona efforts (not personas themselves).
Note here that I’ve lately come to believe that people who are annoying are giving you a gift. They are showing you their true colors. It’s up to you whether you believe them and act accordingly (by, like, not working with them or dating-and-trying-to-change-them or whatever) or you choose to ignore the clear signs. I’m not saying that Steve is annoying (though I was annoyed.) I’m saying that, annoying or not, he’s showing us what many people really truly think of personas. Our choice whether we consider this a gift or a large dose of itching powder in some inopportune article of clothing.
And wait a second…I am NOT trying to flame Steve Portigal. He’s actually made things quite fun again. I disagree with him on his conclusions, but I think his is an awesome cautionary tale–it just took me a minute to get over being annoyed so I could realize that. And while I am not trying to flame him, I do think that his argument is terribly flawed, and would like to continue talking about what I think the real issues are (and I think the real issues are around communication inside organizations–see the end of this post for the challenge to Steve to debate this stuff.)
Oh, so here are key sentences in Steve’s last paragraph—and I don’t think I’m taking things out of context, but if I am, then yell at me and I’ll try to fix it:
If [personas are] the best way to have to keep the organization focused on a “real” customer, then we have larger organizational problems that need to be addressed.”
EXACTLY. Most companies totally have really big organizational problems. To me, that’s exactly what personas are helpful at solving…it’s not about using cardboard cutouts. It’s about what’s keeping a bunch of smart people from creating something great, which is usually related to a huge communication problem that makes people think they’re talking to each other when they are really talking past each other.
With personas, we’re going down the wrong path.”
Well, I think we’re doing a lot of stuff wrong when it comes to creating, using, and talking about personas. but, to quote Peter Merholz’s ‘Personas 99% bad?’ response: “The thing is, when you read the article, it becomes clear that Steve is talking not about personas, but poorly conceived personas.”
Rather than create distancing caricatures, tell stories.”
Er, stories about who? Real people doing the stuff they do now? So, stories that describe how things are NOT working today? And so then some magical mystical thing happens when people read these stories and suddenly the solution becomes wonderfully clear? Or stories about how we imagine real people doing stuff better in the future with our yet-to-be-created product? So, imaginary stories with real people as characters. But then aren’t we risking automating the misery? For example, if we are trying to solve something for a bank, and we use a real teller to tell a story about the future, we’re guaranteeing that the tellers still do the task, right? What if there’s a better option?
Don’t deny the need to do in-person research with real people. Look for ways to represent what you’ve learned in a way that maintains the messiness of actual human being.”
Yup, you need research. BUT, heretically, I think there is a major 80/20 rule when it comes to creating personas, which is very helpful when it comes to the ‘cost’ of doing personas. And that is that 80% of the benefit of personas comes from just creating them using the internal assumptions or embedded knowledge of a team. Assumptions that you can’t see can and will hurt your project. The far-and-away-most-helpful-and-practical value of personas, in my experience, is in bringing agreement and focus (and keeping them) in a team. Actually, to be more clear, bringing agreement and focus to an executive team. So even if I work with a client to create ad-hoc personas in a couple of hours–personas based on goals, not demographics or psychographics or whatever–then I do it, and it always helps. I talk more about this in my cow analogy posting, if you are interested.
And…ummmm….HOW? I would LOVE to hear new ideas on how to ‘represent what you’ve learned’. It’s tricky tricky tricky–because of another issue I have yet to blog about which is that different people in your org need different information at different times (just like actual customers!). And their jobs are not about understanding and remembering data. So it’s all about translation…
How do you recommend translating messy (or tidy) data to the people who need to understand and use it?
So clearly I believe that personas don’t exist on paper (or silly dolls or cutouts or horrifying stock photos or whatever). Just like photos don’t actually capture the souls of the photographees. Personas are all about fixing a huge problem in companies, which isn’t really a problem of whether they are focusing on Jenny Jeans Buyer. It’s the problem that they all think they are focused on customers, and the right customers at that, and they aren’t.
Steve Portigal is finally showing us, clearly, the problem with having ‘other people’ create personas (meaning, not the critical stakeholders working on the project). Personas that are just ‘thrown over the wall’ and land on people’s desks, like the one that landed on his, usually don’t work. Why?
Because you can’t solve a communication problem with a cardboard cutout.
If you could, we wouldn’t need marriage counselors, now would we, and Hallmark would have a very interesting additional section in the greeting card aisle.
Steve’s article is an excellent cautionary tale for anyone who wants to try personas: I think once people in your company think personas are bullshit, you are skeeee-rewed (when it comes to using personas ever again). It’s not easy to do ‘new’ personas ‘the right way.’ Steve’s article is the perfect example of why you really only have one chance to make a good impression when it comes to a personas effort.
Since I’m so late into the whole fracas, I can reference a bunch of the discussions:
Peter Merholtz’s awesomely calm ‘Personas 99% bad?’ reply. I’m impressed, because I’m terrible at being calm. My favorite part (besides the excellent use of the word ‘vitriol,’ which gets extra points in my book):
Steve could have taken two paths — either delineate what it takes to create a truly productive persona, or present other tools that successfully accomplish the objectives that personas fail to meet. However, he does neither, so at the end of the article, you’re simply left wondering, “Well, if personas suck, how do I make sense of my user research? How do I build empathy across a product team?”
Graphpaper’s Research + Interpret + Produce = Design. This is a great discussion of why persona-creation has to be collaborative, and why: …in my view, the primary benefit from creating personas is bestowed upon those who actually make the artifacts, via the thinking, collaboration, and conversations that occur during their creation.
Joshua Porter on Personas and the advantage of designing for yourself. Nice (long! but who the hell am I to talk.) scholarly look at what we really mean by personas. However, my perspective as someone who comes in and helps with product strategy, earlier than when design happens, means that I don’t agree that there are a lot of other ways to ‘summarize your research and learning about your users.’ (not a direct quote, but this is the drift of the second to last paragraph). With execs, I simply haven’t found a better way to do this. Politics get in the way.
Portigal’s stuff on personas: Gotta say it, saying ‘personas are user centered bullshit’ in a preso about how not to suck at research is too easy. Why? Because I don’t see a topic in there about ‘how to communicate the research in a way that non-research-pros will actually understand and remember it.’ That’s my challenge to you, Steve. That’s the debate worth having.
And I will end this in the only way that seems appropriate:
Harumph.
Comments
- By Jason Rakowski on February 26th, 2008 at 2:44 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Jason Rakowski
- By persona non grata on April 6th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
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- By All This ChittahChattah » ChittahChattah Quickies on April 11th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
[…] The Persona Non Grata article is a gift. Really. And people accused me of being overwrought with my column?! Hmm. “And I will end this in the only way that seems appropriate. Harumph. “ Tags: none « ChittahChattah Quickies ChittahChattah Quickies » EMail This Post var blogTool = “WordPress”; var blogURL = “http://www.portigal.com/wp”; var blogTitle = “All This ChittahChattah”; var postURL = “http://www.portigal.com/blog/chittahchattah-quickies-205/”; var postTitle = “ChittahChattah Quickies”; var commentAuthorFieldName = “author”; var commentAuthorLoggedIn = false; var commentFormID = “commentform”; var commentTextFieldName = “comment”; var commentButtonName = “submit”; 1 Comment so far Leave a comment […]