Arguments for the Usage of Personas

Jeroen van Geel from Johnny Holland (Interaction Design focussed blog) wrote quite an interesting article about personas, titled Why shouldn’t I kill personas?. In it he is sort of thinking out loud as to why he perceives personas as still being of value for him (and to the UX community).

For those unfamiliar with personas, they are a design tool that was created by Alan Cooper and elaborately explained in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. (My review here). As mentioned by Jeroen, they are not always implemented, the culprit being (perceived) high cost.

However, I am very convinced that the implementation of a persona (and not only as a outcome after a research process) is of extreme value when you see them as a boundary that you should stay in when deciding what goes in or out of a product. This is in-line with Jeroen’s first argument for the use: making design decisions. If the only function they perform is to set the boundaries and guidelines within which development will take place, they have served their purpose.

This has the very effect that money is not being spent on conjuring up feature that does not fit into what the end user is actually looking for. Might it be to too simplistic to say that this will actually save you money in the short run (development costs) and in the long run (better experience)?