caitlin gannon

Leisa Reichelt, writing for UI Garden, offers a new perspective on using personas in the design process.

I find personas virtually useless when it comes to design, and I very rarely reference them in making design decisions. For me, personas aren’t about design, but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly powerful in other ways.

Rather than using them to drive design, she advocates using personas to communicate the user-centered design process to key stakeholders:

Having your clients view user research and testing is incredibly powerful in helping them realise that there is a problem in the way they’ve been approaching things to date (if you’re not encouraging stakeholders to actively participate in observing research and testing you’re missing out on a lot). But to get them to actually understand what user centred design is about – you need personas. … Personas should always be developed collaboratively with key stakeholders – as many as possible.

Personas can be useful in determining the edge cases, but guiding design around that is dangerous:

Personas should define the boundaries for which you will design. It’s a common misconception that personas are about creating a set of ‘typical’ or ’stereotypical’ users. Much more useful is to use personas which incorporate edge cases behaviour or requirements.

…Creating ‘edge case inclusive’ personas and then prioritising personas and their goals is much more useful in helping decide what functionality goes in and what doesn’t.

… If you use the personas to closely guide your design you will end up supporting a series of edge cases. This will invariably mean that your CORE functionality is compromised. That’s bad design.

Personas help to remind us that there is more than one “user” in “user-centered design”. Instead of saying “the user wants to …” we can use personas to explain that “Susan wants to do X, whereas Scott wants to do Y.”