The best personas are ugly
I hate making personas for clients. But I love making personas WITH clients.
The distinction is critical. So many organizations want me to go off, conduct a pile of research, and come back to them with some beautiful printed posters of their shiny new personas. I could happily take their money and provide this service. However, I don’t, because I know that those personas would never get used.
I know this from experience. In order to be used and useful, personas cannot be created in a black box by a consultant. They must be created by the organization, by the people that will use them. Those people need to participate in the research, need to meet the actual users whose stories will ultimately inform the personas.
I’m usually able to convince a prospective client to participate in a more collaborative process than they were anticipating. But then comes the inevitable question: “But, we’ll still get the professionally designed printable posters at the end, right?”
On its surface, this sounds like a reasonable enough request. I can just take the rough persona sketches that the group generates in a workshop setting and hand them off to a designer to polish up, right?
Wrong.
This “one more step” added onto the process is not only inefficient, but it is also counterproductive to the goal of creating personas that will help the organization to make user-informed product decisions. In my experience, the best (and most used) personas are actually ugly, and I’ll explain why.
“One more step” is never “one more step”.
It sounds so simple to just have a designer work their magic. But this is never the case.
In a persona workshop, a group of stakeholders come together to craft rough persona sketches. They analyze piles of qualitative data, identify the most critical personas to include, and draft the descriptions and narratives. These are game-changing decisions with the potential to dramatically impact the direction of a product, and yet somehow in the context of a collaborative workshop, we can help a diverse group of stakeholders reach consensus relatively easily.
But ask that same group of stakeholders to agree on something as trivial as a color scheme? A typeface? Which stock photo most fits the personality of the persona? Watch the claws come out. And don’t even get me started on the actual fine-tuning of the language used in the personas. These minor decisions always — ALWAYS — eat up way more time and budget than you’d ever expect.
Worse still, I have sometimes seen a single project owner take the persona sketches that were based on research and agreed upon by the entire team and offer, innocently, “Why don’t I just take these and polish them up a bit before handing them off to the designer?” What comes back often does not even resemble the originals. We may as well have just asked the project owner to draft the personas herself based on hunches and assumptions, just skip the research phase entirely.
The “polishing and design” process can drag on for months, and with each revision it moves further and further away from the original personas in a well-meaning attempt to make the personas more “professional and visually appealing.” This, in my opinion, is a bad tradeoff.
The raw notes that came out of a recent persona workshop
Personas should be a living document. A poster is not.
Personas represent a moment in time. They represent the relationship that customers have with a product or brand right now, when you conduct the research. Theoretically, the reason you’re creating personas in the first place is that there will be some changes coming to the product. Maybe based on what you learn, you introduce some new features to appeal to a particular audience. Maybe you pivot the product entirely. Even if the product inexplicably remains exactly the same, the world is always changing around it. All of this means that the relationship between customers and the product will change, and therefore the personas will need to be updated.
Ensuring that personas are a living, breathing document is much easier in theory than in practice. Once you invest in the research and generation of a set of personas, the last thing you want to do is “start over” (even though updating personas seldom necessitates actually starting from scratch).
But one thing you can do to truly ensure resistance to updating a set of personas is to invest heavily in making them beautiful. Beautiful, printed personas feel codified, completed. No one wants to mess with that, especially remembering all of the wordsmithing and pixel-pushing that it took to get to that point.
So, what should my personas look like?
I firmly believe that personas should be just beautiful enough to be legible, readable, and usable. In most cases, this probably will require digitization, but rarely does it necessitate anything beyond a simple Google Doc or slide deck. Google Docs or Slides are great, because they allow multiple people to edit them and keep a record of any changes, making the barrier to updates even lower.
A quick and dirty Google Slides digitization of a persona
We all want our personas to be beautiful. And if you’re lucky enough to have access to a skilled and speedy designer who can slap a coat of paint on them, by all means go for it. But please, avoid doing anything that will make them feel too “complete” to your team. Personas are made to be used, and to be used they must change. And in order to change, they can never truly be complete.
