Personas are effective

Since a number of years I have been working with personas. They are an effective way to make the fuzzy area of target groups, online customers, and online survey results tangible for us, designers.

And what is tangible for designers is tangible for business. Personas give concrete directions for the online strategy. Because personas give answers to the question what your users need and what are we going to do for them.

This is not new anymore, fortunately. Personas are an accepted methodology for our clients.

Up to now this has been based on 'best practice' and gut feeling. There has been little evidence on the actual effectiveness of personas. Now, the results of a first study on persona effectiveness have been published: Research Paper - Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design.

In short, the study confirms that personas do work. They provide the teams better insights so they create better design solutions, faster.

Author Frank Long elaborates in a LinkedIn forum:

Based on the tutors comments, the persona groups were more motivated and focused in their research. They were also more innovative in their concept ideas showing a greater variety of potential solutions - based on user functionality. The control group [that did not use personas] were more focused on aesthetic styling as an entry point onto the project. Once they settled on a look they started to focus on the functionality.
However it took them longer than the persona groups to reach the same level of detail.

For me, one of the other interesting findings is that the picture used on the persona description makes all the difference. Teams in the test that worked with a photographic picture adhered to the persona description, while teams that worked with an illustration tended to have less empathy and even went so far as picking their favorite attributes.

This reveals an important aspect of the psychological effect of personas, and why they must be presented as real as possible. Empathy and focus are the key arguments: personas invoke empathy to achieve focus, so the team can create solutions for real-world motivations, needs and goals.

Apparently, a photographic picture frames our thoughts to the real world, and brings focus to the needs of that persona instead of our own.

We can draw a lesson from this. Some professionals try to teach us that a website is about personalities, and propose to use the 4 buying types (Competitive, Humanistic, Methodical, Spontaneous, sometimes referred to as the (simplified) Myers-Briggs personality types). This way of thinking will frame your thoughts to the world of stereotypes, and will too easily lead you to conventional solutions.

Personality types may be used as additional input for your personas; they should never drive them.