Personas: Useless Without Proper Research?

Personas are a very handy design tool. It helps you determine the behavior of a product and puts the focus on designing for the users. However, a proper persona is the result of a lot of research. Without this research we are basically sketching a picture of what we think a user should be like. We usually have an idea who we are designing for without researching it properly and without this research we base our persona on this preconceived idea of the user, resulting in personas that are ultimately figments of our own imagination, rendering them useless.

Proper research needs to be conducted in order to construct proper personas. The result of not having done proper research is as mentioned above, we create personas based on what we expect the user to be, not what the user is actually like.

Should we abandon personas when they are not created without research? Maybe, if there hasn’t been enough research conducted, the focus could be shifted to task centred design, something that has been discussed in Robert Hoekman Jr’s Designing the Obvious. A free copy of Clayton Lewis and John Rieman’s book Task-Centered User Interface Design is available here.

EDIT: Coincidently stumbled across a post made by Leisa Reichelt at uiGarden.net titled Yes, you should be using personas, arguing for the use of personas. Worth a read.