The boundaries of personas

Elyse Sanchez, Friday, May 11, 2007 @ 2:36 pm

Leisa Reichelt has recently published a thought-provoking post on her site, disambiguity, titled "Yes, you should be using personas." She states that she's "come to the opinion that personas are incredibly valuable, but not for the reasons many people think they are."

Instead of functioning as a tool to justify design, she argues, personas should serve as the vehicle to communicate the user centered process to stakeholders. By involving the members of the project team in the creation of personas, as well as involving them in user research and testing, they will gain first-hand experience with the design process. And that is, I think, more compelling than having the UXD team create beautifully formatted artifacts in isolation and then present them with a flourish (and extended explanation).

So far, Reichelt is espousing complete--even obvious--commonsense. Then, she takes a very interesting approach to personas, stating that once design begins, she never refers to them again. Her stance is that personas are useful for defining user requirements and prioritizing features. Rather than create personas that embody the qualities of the target users, she instead prefers to create personas that exemplify the "edge cases": precisely the users she would not design for. These personas, she reasons, cut down the "elastic user" at the knees.

The concept of the elastic user is Allan Cooper's, and signifies the tendency of project stakeholders to generalize users into a single, homogenous entity. The edge case "anti-personas" then function as a brake on broad generalizations about what "the users" want or need.

Leisa Reichelt is also the originator of the intriguing and whimisical Waterfall is bad, washing machine is good, a presentation she gave at the IA summit in which she proposes a paradigm for UXD integration in an agile development process.

user experience design

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   Interesting idea, these “anti-personas.” I often have a “non-goals” section of my PRD which serves a similar function trying to protect against mission creep. It seems to me that a few well-written personas that include info on what is *not* important to those individuals would serve the same purpose, though, without sacrificing a description of the users you *are* targeting.

   I attended a good webinar on developing personas put on by User Interface Engineering and posted my notes here:
   http://www.userdriven.org/blog/personas-are-not-fictional-either.html

   Comment by Bruce McCarthy, Wednesday, November 21, 2007 @ 2:53 pm

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