Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Problems with Personas

The goal of using personas is to make the design process more human-centered. But be aware that there are a number of problems with this.

Personas can be too elastic. Since personas are essentially imaginary people, they can’t defend themselves. As a result, they can sometimes reinforce predetermined conclusions: if you’re using imaginary people as your target audience, you can always come up with an imaginary scenario that validates whatever opinions you currently hold.

Personas give the impression of being human-centered without anyone having to interact with actual humans. They can be a fig leaf used to cover up a design process that is not human-centered at all. Personas can absolve designers from actually doing any ...