Robert | 12.26.2005 @ 2:48 PM
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It may have taken four months for me to stumble across this article, but now that I've read
Persona Non Grata, by Dan Saffer at Adaptive Path, I want to debate one of Saffer's statements. Consider the following:

"There’s little sense in having a set of personas around if you don’t beat them against actual projects. Once you’ve developed a persona set, the team needs to use them, by running them through scenarios of use and testing features both for appropriateness and for utility. Would this persona do this task? Could this persona do this task as it is designed?"

I agree completely with the first sentence. And the second one. But the two questions that end the paragraph imply that Adaptive Path continues to rely on personas after their usefulness has run out.

Personas are best used when designing a product. Once the product has been created, or at least prototyped, I strongly feel their usefulness has expired. How can we even pretend that we can objectively answer questions like "Could this persona do this task as it is designed?" We're not character actors, we're designers. We take the information we get from user-research and construct personas from it. Then we use those personas as a target for the design, and we focus the design strictly on the personas, so only what is good for the target audience is created. Once the design becomes a product, the answer to Saffer's question is going to be "yes" far more often than it should be. We're certainly not going to readily admit that we designed something that does not work for our personas. No, no, no.

Most, if not all, interaction designers know, at least to some degree, that programmers don't respect them unless they're decisions are confident and based in reality. Wavering after code has been written is the last thing you'd ever want to do, so when you start asking if your persona will be able to complete a certain task as you've designed it, you're answer is assuredly going to be "yes". If it's not, you're a fool. If it is, you're answer is not based on reality.

Use personas for interaction design (up to and including wireframes and mockups). Once a functioning product is in the works, use real people to test it instead of running what are ultimately imaginary people through imaginary situations (a.k.a "scenarios"). Go back to the same people you interviewed while creating personas and test the product with them. Find people who represent your target audience and test the product with them.

Use personas to guide the design. Use people to validate it.