Thursday, March 8, 2012

Persona Non Grata

The use of personas (I would prefer to say personae, but I keep getting corrected) in our UX and CX design work has always confused me. More recently, it has started to annoy me. Why replace perfectly good, real, human customers that we've spoken to and continue to speak to, with generalized approximations? Isn't this creating exactly the kind of abstraction that leaves room for misinterpretation and misrepresentation? As much as I've come to know and love Jane Doe and Joe Bloggs, frankly, they strike me as somewhat pliant and a little too enthusiastic with all our design decisions.

Admittedly, real customers are a little harder to pigeon hole, a little less logical, a little unwieldy with their requirements, considerably more opinionated, they aren't even always right, but they do have one very important advantage, they are... em... well, customers dammit! They are of course diverse, but not so diverse that any persona we create, cannot be replaced with 2 or 3 representative real-live customers. Customers also tend to come with working phone numbers and email addresses, so they can actually engage in the design process.

We've gone on a Customer Experience Journey mapping trip in my company over the past year or so. It struck me as so strange to replace the sources who were real people with amalgams and substitutes. Other than maybe dealing with confidentiality (so of course change the names), the effect seemed to be little more than diluting the impact of the journey maps we had created. Quoting a real customer, complete with expletives and directions on where we could stick our processes, somehow seemed so much more compelling, and considerably harder to argue with.

Somewhat contentiously in my own company, I've concluded the advantages served up by carefully crafted persona, are quickly outweighed with the dynamic and sometimes random input of real customers. The earlier they are brought into the design process the better, because let's face it, what we can actually change when we get to testing is pretty limited. I see only two potential exceptions: when the product is so competitively advantageous that we do not want it to leak out before we launch; the processes and policies we want to create, will not make sense to a real customer without the context of other changes too difficult to explain. I have encountered neither of these exceptions so far in my CX design work that focuses primarily on our business practices, policies and processes.

Be great, be authentic, keep it real!

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