Should you be using Personas?

Welcome to the Product Bakery again. My name is Christian and I'm here as always with my co-host Alex. Hi Christian. Hi Alex. So you seem to be very happy and I can understand because we had a great dinner but we also had a very heated discussion today. So we thought okay let's sit down and discuss it in today's episode. Before I'm going to tell you what and why we discussed the topic I would just like to remind you that you can follow us on social media and in case you like this episode or one of our previous episodes feel free to share it with your colleagues and your network. So what was this conversation about? So we talked about the whole topic of personas and Alex I know that you have a very strong opinion about dealing with personas. I have one as well. I'm actually quite relaxed. What's your opinion? Let's start with that. You directly want to get started. So we talked about topics such as defining personas and understanding the users of your product and we ended up in the big question if I should use personas and if it's the right way to understand how people using our product and who is using our product. That's a very good introduction and I think probably everyone is aware of what personas are but maybe I think it's very good to start by summarizing or by at least talking about why we're using personas in the first place or why personas exist and I think because that's something where I believe that is actually pretty good. I think that generally speaking personas have the goal to help us emphasize, empathize, emphasize with the users and to give the user also a picture right and I think to like constantly have in mind the people that we are designing for or the people that we are building the products for. Now I think where a lot of the conversation is coming from of should we use personas is a little bit like over the past you can see a trend on how to create personas and it's very easy right if you go to Google and you type in personas, UX personas, user personas whatsoever you will very quickly see these templates or these personas that are created and there's like a picture and there's like this name it's Maria she's 39 years old and whatsoever and I think this is a little bit like where I'm struggling with because does Maria 39 year old mother of two kids working in finance really help you understand the users? I like that you dropped this question because taking one step back I think the idea of defining personas is to represent the average user of our product. If I have enough data and I can create an average idea based on my data in form of a persona I would say yes it helps me to understand for whom I'm working for or for whom I'm building something. Yeah but I think already with the averaging the problem arises right because if you want to have a good user experience you cannot only look at the average user because then you exclude a lot of the extreme cases the extreme users or especially use cases that your product might address and you simply don't think about them. I think like averaging works pretty well when you talk about personas in the context of marketing right because like how do I reach most of our users is one question. How do I then make it usable for all of them? I think that's like something where it's more important to look at all the different jobs to be done and I'm using jobs to be done now because I think that's another framework that you can use to also emphasize with your users and I think that someone that at least in my experience helped me a lot more because I don't really need a lot of demographics that a lot of people put in personas. I need to know how are people using the product, when are they using it, why are they using it. So if we can do something we should use the research to build that understanding and it's more around like different creating different archetypes understanding better all the different use cases and especially looking at the extremes because the extremes when designing for the extremes you manage to also cover a wider range of needs. When we look at extremes we could also say let's take the average data and cluster them right so we could say okay we have this average persona and then we have additional persona who are on the edges of the extreme power user or the person who's rarely using my product which means I would create more than one persona. Isn't that already a way to go into the direction of clustering my personas on certain usage levels as well as including the job that needs to be done for the certain persona as well? Yeah but if we talk about a job to be done do you think that it's only relevant for Maria or for Peter or? No absolutely not. And I think that's a little bit where I'm saying and I'm not saying that's not use personas right I think personas are good. I just don't like the way it has become like a standard framework of oh you need to give them a face you need to give them a you need to give them a name and let's sit in our discovery meeting and be like oh how would Maria use this product. I think that doesn't get you anywhere because then you're still stuck in your assumptions because that person doesn't exist. It's a person that you created based on multiple different points and now you're starting to create your assumptions on it. Exactly and I think you are still living in this bubble of defining hypothesis instead of really focusing on what's the problem slash what's the job to be done. Exactly exactly. And what would you recommend if I'm for example a designer or a product manager if I want to define a way what would you recommend a product person to do if I want to understand my users better and to build the right product for certain use cases. I think in general there are different faces where you can use personas and you can treat them also differently based on the faces and based on the information that you have. So as you say there is like a point in time in product development where you work with hypothesis right and you can have a hypothesis around users. Sometimes you have to right. Yeah and that's usually very early also and you maybe don't have the data yet you maybe didn't have the time to do some research yet and so on. That's the time where you should then go out and start getting to know users better and start doing your research. Then the research also is like the perfect time to use all the information that you have to define okay what do we want to use what will help us also in our product development process and in the design process and to then like really isolate the different themes or the different jobs to be done or the different needs pain points and so on that can help you in the process and to like really then use those as a basis and it can be I wouldn't say necessarily I wouldn't go into age groups sex or something like that but again more like looking at the data that you have in place and then make sure yeah maybe you can find some archetypes maybe the power user you can't give him a face but you can find some patterns that are specific for that user and then you can formulate something around that one but I think at the end it's important on what exactly you're working on and really looking at the needs of what you need for your specific product for your specific project and process and what can help you and that shouldn't be a template that you just fill out. Yeah and we talked also to Ben the author of Lean Analytics about exactly that to take a look at the people who are using for example your product very intensively and to start understanding what they want to achieve and what problems they have but I'm just based on what you said have to have the feeling that the definition of a persona as well as defining the jobs to be done can harmonize very well so would you say it makes sense to define certain user personas as well as including the jobs they're trying to get done? Yeah I think whatever you want to work with you should definitely around your and let's call them personas you should have their needs their pain points their jobs to be done collected there because that's at the end the things that you need to work with I'm still struggling a little bit with necessarily like grouping them under one specific persona right because I think a specific job can be relevant for different segments or for different groups of people and you want to look at that specific job to be done as something that you want to solve but then it comes back down to what do you want to work with right do you want to have a list of different jobs to be done do you prefer having some bigger archetypes or themes or groups or mental models for different people that you then create but that's then down to like really again looking at what is the information that we have what is important for us to build the right product what helps us to answer questions that we might have like in the product development cycle and I think that's like also the key right it should be a way to better understand if you're building the right thing and it should give you this as an answer it should not be something like where it's like oh yeah but what would Maria do because again then you're still in the assumption world and you want to actually have a clearer picture of your audience and of your users and then at the end you still need to go back and further validate your ideas so it shouldn't also be that okay we now based on assumptions that we made up on a person you validate an idea and you can blindly launch it or blindly build it so I think it's only small part of a product designer or product managers tool set that they can use to develop better products so you are actually warning for not ending up in this bubble of just thinking about one persona that we have defined once and being too much focused on our own hypothesis instead of further inquiring and understanding what the job to be done is or what problems the persona has yeah yeah and it's again it's all different tools right like also jobs to be done is not the answer to everything it's just another tool that you can add to the mix talking about mix you jumped between different terminologies so you mentioned sometimes the persona and sometimes the user do you distinguish there oh that's a long conversation generally I would always refer to the user like I wouldn't refer to a persona because at the end it's the user using it I'm not saying it's a long conversation because I don't remember where but I read a book where and I actually found that's an interesting point right where they brought up that only in the context of products we talk about users we talk about users and okay so there's two contexts where you talk about users one is a product and the other one is addicts or something right when you're using something so I think that that got me a little bit thinking right should we call it users should we call it customers at the end it's we're serving our customers we're building products for people that at the end are going to use it it's one between the two whatever you prefer if you want to go down the route of okay should we think of our users as users I don't know but that's the terminology that I would use when I refer to the people I'm designing for so I knew the user terminology always when I was starting a new computer game I needed to create my account as a user yeah that's it's a very digital kind of thing yeah I agree it's definitely the more digital way but we are also living in a digital world and most of us building also digital products so fair point is there anything else you want to emphasize on when people getting started working with personas yeah don't use a template and fill it out with your assumptions try to make a conscious decision and to look at what can really help you let it always be informed by actual research actual data actual user insights and then find whatever works best for your company well said alex so I'm going to create now my user account no uh kidding um kidding no uh fair point and in case you want to further discuss this topic because many people have different opinions on that drop a comment on our episode page at product-bakery.com slash episodes and let's have a chat amazing curious to hear everyone's opinion on this all right thanks alex thanks christian and bye