Personas

Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members

What I found very interesting about this article is that the way they express making personas, is that it is not only great for presentations for stakeholders (which I believed for some reason), but instead it is meant to remind the designer who they are designing for, so it is not just a technical product but a product that is made for humans. Making personas should not be something that user-centered-designers should do at the end of their design process but something to consider in the early stages, to make sure that the user is always being remembered and is the focal point of what they are designing. If this isn’t done it is so easy for users to become second to the technical innovation of the product and that isn’t the way we should be designing objects/tools for humans. Creating personas is essential for keeping the user in the center of user-centered-design.

Why Personas Fail

I really enjoyed this text, because in my experience persons have always failed me. I have never really found them useful and tend to just make something up really quickly without giving it much thought. This reading and video really helped me re-think how I perceive using personas in my own design process. My main take-away was that personas fail when they aren’t researched. This is because the designer isn’t creating a persona based on what they know and have researched, but instead creating a person that would be ideal. A quote that stuck with me that illustrates this was “Personas are not a one-size-fits-all tool; they should be used with a specific, well-defined goal in mind. For personas to be useful, the data captured in a persona should reflect the goal for that persona and the scope of work it is meant to impact.” The personas that don’t fail are well researched, and have the ability to provide incredible insights about the user to the user-centered-designer.