Leading design firms often use personas when developing consumer hardware and software products and information-intensive Web sites. A good overview of how to use personas can be found in Alison Head’s article “Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites.”The Wikipedia article on personas gives additional references.
Not everyone is a fan of personas. Jason at 37signals suggests that personas give “a false sense of understanding.” He says “Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems. We recognize our problems aren’t unique. In fact, our problems are probably a lot like your problems. So we bundle up the solutions to our problems in the form of web-based software and offer them for sale. We recognize not everyone shares our problems, our point of view, or our opinions, but that verdict’s the same if you use personas.”
The problem with this line of thinking when developing products for the Church is that the typical Church member is not like us.
The typical Church employee at headquarters is a multi-generation member, speaks English, is a North American, is affluent according to world standards, is literate, owns a computer, and learns from reading.
The typical Church member is a convert to the Church, doesn’t speaks English, is not North American, is not affluent, is less literate, does not own a computer, and learns from seeing and hearing.
Don’t fall into this trap of thinking that “if it works for me, it’ll work for everyone else.” We are not like the typical member of the Church.
YAAAA!! Somebody noticed!!
The whole idea of “Personas” is to help a design and development team understand the audience better. The thing is, there are other ways to do that which can be effective, and possibly more effective than creating personas. Leading design firms often use “Personas” not just because they help understand the customer, but because they provide another service that they can bill their clients. The work it takes to create a “Persona” may or may not be worth the benefit that it brings.
From my experience, a Persona is created based on demographic research. A group of 10 to 20 people is usually brought together for a series of meetings where the available data, research, and shared knowledge about the audience is discussed and infused into imaginary characters which are supposed to represent the audience. It could easily cost $10,000 to $50,000 (or more) to generate personas for a website project. Another major problem with the “Personas” approach is that the persona is an imaginary person, and may or may not really represent the end user. There’s no way to really know for sure, until your product is validated with the “real” customer.
Understanding culture, history, language, and getting to personally know the audience that you are trying reach can be just as effective. Rigorous study of the available research and demographic information can also provide important clues that will help you better meet the needs of the audience.
But best of all, finding and interviewing real people. The Church has people all around the world, and a very solid communication infrastructure that should make it very easy to begin a dialog with our real customers.
I really like what Dan Saffer from Adaptive path says about personas – he has a very balanced view and makes some good points about the negatives and positives that Personas can provide.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000524.php
Great topic for discussion.
I very, very much agree with your statements about the trap of thinking “if it works for me, it’ll work for others”. I also agree that Jason’s 37signals model just doesn’t work for us here. Jason purposefully created the situation where his team’s needs do represent his intended user’s needs. He has the option to be very picky and selective about who he creates products for. We just don’t have that option. We have to address the needs of a extremely diverse worldwide audience the majority of whom, as you said, we don’t come close to representing.
That said, I’m not a fan of “personas” as a tool for helping us identify and meet the needs of such a large and diverse audience. In my experience, personas, even well-researched, well-defined, user-centered design approved ones, don’t help in the real design decisions that matter to end-users. For instance, personas don’t provide guidance on what term I should use for a field label or a title. They don’t provide guidance on which color will work better. They don’t provide guidance on what’s complicated and what’s easy. IMHO, they don’t even provide good guidance on what features will be more useful than another. Those detailed design decisions are the ones that really matter, the ones that make all the difference between a mediocre design and a great design. In my experience personas provide little help here.
I actually think the tools may not exist today that would really help us become adequately informed in a meaningful, decision-helping way for such a large diverse world-wide audience. I think this is an area we need more innovation and inspiration to address. However, here are two ideas that may be worth more discussion.
Improve end-user feedback loops: We need to give end-users a much stronger voice in what is going well and what is going wrong and what they really need. One idea would be to create a world-wide MVP group. Real end-users who could personally represent the needs and desires of large groups of our audience. Persons who could be in face to face contact with large portions of our audience (something we’ll never be able to afford to do) and then represent those groups. This MVP group could be involved not just in post-release feedback, but in pre-release feedback, the early design process and the development process. We could create easy, secure, ad-hoc online ways for us to ask them questions about feature priorities, feature design, product usability, and much more. We could do things like run an early prototype design past this group and get their input on what works, what doesn’t, what’s missing and then make adjustments. In my experience, this type of input and feedback is far more valuable and decision-making helpful than personas.
Release and Iterate More Frequently: I think we need to admit that at some level the cost of fully understanding our end-user’s needs and meeting those needs with “Release 1.0” is just too high. We need to be willing to “not get it right” the first time and assume that we will miss some things and plan to fix mistakes as quickly as possible in an ongoing, iterative way. The less-expensive, more effective way is to do small releases and plan to get feedback and iterate often. Deliver real solutions to real end-users then listen and adjust quickly in quick, successive releases.
Those are two ideas, I’m sure we have plenty more in our organization, but again, I’m convinced that this “nut” has not been cracked yet in the world. Few organizations are trying to deliver so many products to such a large and diverse worldwide audience. I think companies like Nike, Pepsi, and P&G are getting really good at this and that we could learn from them, but as I said earlier to really make headway here, we need innovation, inspiration and knowledge that may not have been revealed yet.
Great thoughts Tadd.
Your comment on Release and Iterate more frequently is the key. The key to being successful with that strategy though is
1. Removing the barrier to feedback – it has to be easy to give feedback
2. Accountability for the feedback – a feedback system where the feedback goes in and no response comes out over time will not get used. People won’t feel the value so there must be a response at some level. Thanking them for the feedback doesn’t count – much more effective is to collect that feedback somewhere and allow the person a chance to check the status of it.
As you said though in order to release more frequently we can’t be afraid of getting something wrong. That said we can’t get security wrong – exposing data that shouldn’t be exposed especially the data the Church has is unacceptable. We can be wrong with the feature set, presentation style, etc…
Take the Unit Websites for example. We did a great thing by getting them out there and people have used it, but there are a lot of flaws that hinder adoption. Being a user and having been a user and proponent for a while a few small iterations with some subtle changes could have easily resolved many of those things. Hopefully that is something we will see in the not too far future.
To me the MVP style group you talked about have many of the same drawbacks that personas do. Yes it would have the advantage of being a living breathing person, but over time that group won’t represent reality. The feedback they give will be valuable just as the guidance a set of personas gives can be, but ultimately you only get part of the picture. That fact has to be taken into context anytime you use a mechanism that attempts to represent the masses through some very, very small sample that you “hope” is representative.
Excellent post, Larry.