Over the last few years I’ve become more and more sceptical on the value of personas. I know they’ve always been a popular part in the user centred design methodology, which kind of means that they are holy. But I also believe that from the moment they were introduced they were also misused or based upon the wrong data. For me this was the moment to call in the help of a few experienced UX friends. Why should I still use personas?

For the discussion I e-mailed Steve Baty, Adrian Chan, Will Evans and Dennis Koks. This resulted in a four-day long mail discussion. Below is my translation and interpretation of that discussion, which proved to be of great value for me. Note: right before I finished this article there was an interesting discussion on the IxDA discussion list.

The way personas should be used

Before we dive into the discussion it’s important to look at personas from an encyclopedic perspective. What are they and what are they supposed to do? According to Alan Cooper, the grand creator himself, personas are and were originally intended as a heuristic. They are for client communication and orientation. As Adrian Chan states it “they encapsulate and personalize use cases.” To be able to do this you need to have quantitative and qualitative research data, which can be analyzed thoroughly and translated in worthy archetypes.

How are they often used?

Unfortunately the textbook description of personas is too often a myth. Everywhere I look they are NOT based upon thorough research and mainly a tool to please the client. Will Evans says “that a great many advocates of personas simply don’t get to do them – or do them right – because no money is allocated for design ethnography – and even if there is money dedicated to research, practitioners don’t know how to take that research and turn it into personas which are actionable in the actual design process.” I think his remark hits the spot. Maybe big companies such as Microsoft, Philips and Nike have huge budgets to do proper research, smaller companies and design companies often don’t have this luxurious position. But this doesn’t take away the need for proper data. We need to look for possible solutions here, which isn’t coming up with personas based upon assumptions and ‘experience’.

Adrian Chan, in my opinion a pioneer on the field of social interaction design, states “I’m all for a move among social interaction designers to replace cardboard user peronas and instead use psychologically-grounded personality types.” This could prove an interesting improvement. According to Adrian these personality types should not become archetypes, since these are usually not interaction oriented and not specific to social media. It’s an interesting thing to try and understand the personality types, expecially when they are based upon actual psychological research.

So at this point the scepsis was still in my head. Fortunately the discussion gave me three useful reasons why I should continue with personas. Let’s check them out:

1. Great for design decisions

One of the biggest advantages of having personas, based upon good research, is that you can use them for design decisions. As Will Evans puts it “Someone is going to make decisions – often a vocal stakeholder who thinks they know a lot more than they actually do – the VP of Marketing that wants to prioritize a certain feature or piece of functionality because “My daughter is our target audience – I know my daughter – so we should do X” and if a designer has no data, no research, and no personas derived from that – no matter how bad the idea – there is no way to argue against it. User research and resulting personas helps in making prioritization decisions about initiatives and features based on actual users as opposed to the whims of:
1. The designer with their own prejudices
2. The powerful stakeholder
3. The developer
4. Anyone who is not the intended audience”

2. Great as a debrief / briefing

When working for a client it’s really important to dive into their world and prove you really understand it. Personas can help you with this. They form a good summary of the target audience and are a great debrief for your customer. After presenting them I always start a discussion, trying to see how their world matches with the personas. Being truly interested in their audience, but also in how the client perceives it is worth so much. It brings you on the same level as the client, making them feel you really care about their message/product/service.

Another great thing, besides debriefing, is actual briefing. When fresh team members join the design team personas form a perfect guide into the project. They are a nice summary of the data, which gets the fresh people up to your knowledge level faster. This is the real goal of personas: being a means to translate and transfer research and knowledge to others. As Steve puts it “The persona provides us a way to transfer some of the value we derived from the research & analysis process to other members of the team. It isn’t a perfectly efficient transfer – some of the value is lost. That’s what we’re doing when we communicate *through* the artifact: transferring that knowledge/insight/learning out to people who couldn’t be involved in the process of producing it.”

Remember to approach personas from this perspective and it will help you make them more communicative. They should tell a story for themselves, dipping you into their mental and physical world.

The end result and the data is far LESS important than the immersion in the experience of the target audience – Will Evans

3. It’s about the process

I always learned to save the best for last. So this third reason was the one that made me a believer again. It was a quote from Steve Baty that made me see the light: “Personas are an outcome; not the process.” Everybody is staring at the outcome all the time, using the personas as if they are treasures… but that’s not it. It’s the process itself that’s priceless. Personas are only a tool that force us (designers) to do actual research. It’s a means to make us submerge in the world of our target audience and truly, deeply understand them. It helps Dennis Koks “to create a better understanding, and it helps [him] interpret the outcomes better during the rest of the design process.“ Steve Baty states that “only some of the value of personas is encapsulated in the end result; much of it comes from the exploration of the data itself.”

Personas are an outcome; not the process – Steve Baty

In the IxDA discussion Dave Malouf said that “if you are selling Personas then it seems that that is your first mistake. Sell research and don’t even tell people how you are going to model it. Maybe the research itself will tell you the appropriate way to model your analysis.”

So immersion is the key. In my mind it has even become one of the few user centred design approaches each designer must undergo. Will even wants to go so far “as a designer the whole goal is a violent sense of empathy for the user in their own context – the data in this case and the persona are completely useless if there is no bond with the end user. Design insights that were not directly experienced by the designer are worthless.”

“This raises an interesting question: do we need to carry out our own research? Is it enough to analyze the data? If we get a series of ‘design insights’, how bad is that?”  – Steve Baty

As a closure (in other words: I’m starting to repeat myself)

A thing about personas which, in my opinion, is still overrated… Is the value throughout the project. It is often believed that after personas are created they will live on and should come back in all discussions. Even when I’m typing this I want to believe it. I want to put their portraits on my desk and always use their names in discussions, but it almost never works out like this. For me they are important because they make me do research. When I create personas I have to force myself to trully understand the user and context. It makes me want to collect all the data and the translation into personas is more important than the end result. And after that the presentation of the personas to the client also helps to show and test if you really understand their customers. It’s a great starting point for trust with the client and forms a good discussion. After this I think they are less important for the people who actually created them, since they already submerged… they can use them as a reference, reminding themselves sometimes. But they are a great tool for new members of the design team.

I wish to thank Steve Baty, Adrian Chan, Will Evans and Dennis Koks for a great discussion. And Dave Malouf for stealing his quote. In my opinion this discussion is what Johnny is all about.

Images by moonsoleil & randy son of robert

Ever since the social web started emerging, the internet became a  collection of highly personal data. This data already ends up at companies and governments, but they merely use it in their design process or to determine the direction in which they develop their policies instead of making it a part of the actual product or service itself. This made me wonder; is this it?

For the first time in history our day-to-day emotions, thoughts, decisions, discussions, experiences etc. are being collected in one centralized place, and all we can do with it is use it to create guidelines?

When you talk to people about the internet being one big collective diary, then most of them will agree; it really is something extraordinary. But that’s often where it ends. There are already people who ‘play around’ with this data in a different way than just using it to create guidelines. Jonathan Harris for example, is intrigued by the hidden stories of the internet and has tried to uncover them in projects like ‘we feel fine‘ and ‘I want you to want me‘. Within these projects emotional trends are made visible and when you place  them on a timeline combined with historical events, interesting things start  to happen. You can see how ‘the world’ experienced a lot of negative emotions around the attacks of 9/11, and a lot of positive ones after Obama won the elections. But in the end, projects like these only put a greater emphasis on the potential of the data, instead of actually doing something with it.

I believe this data has the potential to change both human-computer interaction and human-human interaction tremendously. For now I want to shoot at human-human interaction. Though the thoughts behind it are much more conceptual than the ones behind human-computer interaction, I also find them to be much more exhilarating and I believe they will have a much more profound impact on society. I’m not trying to explain a bulletproof theory here in any way, but merely illustrating one of the many points of view which one can have upon this matter.

Social cohesion
One of the things in which the internet excels is exposing the social cohesion (the common ground) amongst groups of people, and bringing them together in one place. This is what happens in online social networks. As a consequence people who are completely unknown to each other are often seen having a wonderful conversation just on the basis of for example their taste of music. (a friend of mine is now even in a terrific relationship with someone he met on last.fm) This is an example of how personal data has been made relevant for more people than just you and your friends.

Nowadays, mobile internet is booming and wifi spots are popping up everywhere. Once you’re connected we know who you are (not just your name but think of all the stuff you left on facebook, flickr, youtube, twitter , the things you bought on amazon etc), and where you are. Now imagine going out for a quick lunch by yourself. How would that be different if you would know that the friendly looking fellow sitting next to you went to the same concert as you last night, or just became a father just like you? Would you start a conversation just as easy as you would online? Off course a lot of other factors play a role when you decide wether to start a conversation with someone or not, but could it aid in lowering some thresholds?

Let’s take it a step further. Tv-commercials are very different in each country, but the commercials from charities like Unicef or Novib all have some characteristics in common. Often they contain tragic images from children or amputees in third world countries (or other tragic images alike). Why? Because we can relate to those images. After seeing them we feel compassion, some people even experience a feeling guild. These are strong emotions and if experienced strong enough we act upon them.

Now what would happen if you could evoke those emotions amongst the people in a soccer stadium when riots break out. What if everyone goes ballistic and suddenly family pictures and pictures of kids who are currently present in the stadium show up on the screens accompanied by a strong message. Would the riots die down quicker? Could all the personal data of people collected on the internet serve as a tool for crowd management? Simply by showing people that they’re not so different from each other or by trying to let them relate to others around.

A couple months ago I gave a presentation at the Next Web Salon (a intimate version of the Next Web conference) in which I talked about these ideas. Someone there asked me the question if this could mean the end of war. Now I don’t believe that’s the case. But what can we achieve by uncovering the right common ground at the right time? Would we be happier when feeling more related to each other? Would our behavior change as a consequence of this? How will the biggest collective diary known to mankind change our behavior in our future society?

Image: Visualization of the internet made by students from the university of Birmingham

Have you ever wondered what happens with the personal data that you put online? I know I did. But the first thing you’ll often think about are the short term consequences. What if I’m going for a job interview, and they find some old party pictures? What if my son’s classmates will find something about me which would make him feel embarrassed? But have you ever wondered what our personal data could mean for the generations to come, and how they can interact with it?

Almost everyday I put some personal data online. Data that will basically be out there forever and which is accessible to everybody. Looking at it from this perspective, the Internet can be seen as an interactive collaborative diary. This includes my (future) kids, and their kids, and theirs. Never has there been so much personal data available in a centralized place as today, and it’s getting growing every second.

Shouldn’t we ask questions such as: How can new generations interact with all this personal data of previous generations in a meaningful manner? Data that often has the potential to evoke emotions amongst it’s viewers, depending on the relationship they have with it. How would we want to interact with it, and how can we make it a rich experience?

Etoy.Corporation is the first company I came across which does something with this data. Something more than just offering it in a centralized place. Their ongoing project called ‘Mission eternity sarcophagus‘ collects this data and makes it accessible in a cargo container of which all sides (including the floor and the ceiling) have been covered with LED screens. Once in the container you can interact with the data using your own phone or browser-enabled device.

With the data they aim to resemble one merged personality. Therefore the data itself is displayed in a very pixelated manner. By doing this, the potentially strong emotional impact this type of data could have is diminished. However, it’s an interesting project when you look at the characteristics of the data they use, how it is experienced, and how you can interact with it.

Here is one video of it. A video which reveals a bit more of the way users interact with it can be found here.