Building a b2c persona

And why personas don't have to suck when they are done right

👋🏻Hi, this is Nikki with a 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 article from User Research Academy. In every article, I cover in-depth topics on how to conduct user research, grow in your career, and fall in love with the craft of user research again.

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I sometimes feel bad for personas because they can get such a bad reputation. Well, to be fair, all research deliverables can fall into a bad reputation, from customer journey maps to reports to charts.

However, I will say this:

It 👏🏻 is 👏🏻 not 👏🏻 the 👏🏻 persona’s 👏🏻 fault 👏🏻

(I’m really loving this whole clapping at every word thing recently - what an age we live in that emojis bring emotion to text 😜).

Personas (and other deliverables) are often set up for failure due to many different reasons:

1. They aren’t created with the right information, so they aren’t actionable (I know, I hate that word too and I’ll explain it better later)

2. There are too many created at once, so no one knows which to use when

3. There isn’t enough deep research done to create them, resulting in shallow information

See? The problem doesn’t come inherently from the persona as a deliverable.

So, what is the problem?

I’ve created and seen many personas in my career, and the number one problem, the number one reason people hate them, is:

No one uses the persona after it’s created.

We do all this work for the persona to sit in a corner, sad, alone, and unused. It’s like someone who doesn’t get picked for the dodgeball team. And then we (and others) think:

“What a colossal waste of time!”

And, yes, if the persona goes unused, it is a huge waste of time and energy, not only for you as the researcher but for your team and also your participants. It can be hugely frustrating to create an deliverable that goes unused but, when one takes such a large effort, it’s even more disappointing.

With the personas I have seen, I’m not surprised product/tech people dislike them. So, let’s look at a few of my previous unideal personas* before I bring you through my process of building better personas.

*Please don’t get discouraged if your personas look like this. We all start somewhere and it’s about improvement!

Before we rip apart my previous work (kill your darlings), I just want to remind us what the point and goal of a persona is:

Personas are a tool to help our teams more deeply understand the context of our users so that the team can make better decisions on:

1. What types of features/products/services to focus on

2. What to improve in the current features/products/services

3. What to create next that aligns with users’ needs, pain points, and goals

Ultimately, personas are about alignment. They aren’t magical unicorns that will give us answers to all our questions. We still need to answer the questions, but personas give us data to better answer those questions in a more informed and user-centric way.

My first-ever personas

My first ever user research personas

Aw - good memories. I created these personas in 2014, and they were the first I had ever created (as you may be able to tell).

This was a personal project I did as a case study for applying to user research jobs. The project was about how to rehome animals from shelters better by connecting people who needed to rehome their pets directly with those who wanted to adopt pets. Great concept, in my humble opinion.

However, looking at these personas, and going back to what I mentioned above as the point of personas, you might see where they fall short.

Although I did put in a little story (which I actually like to do now too), there is such limited information in these personas. If I gave these to a team and asked them to make decisions based on them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they told me that they couldn’t do so. In fact, I’d be blown away if anyone said they could make more informed decisions about the topic with these personas.

So, what really doesn’t work about them?

The information in these personas is incredibly vague and shallow. Look at some of the frustrations and pain points for Regina:

• “In a time crunch”

• “Not finding helpful resources”

And now for Adam:

• “Application process very difficult and uninformed”

WHAT DO THESE MEAN?

Absolutely nothing. If I gave you this information and told you to make a product, you’d look at me like I’m Fluffy from Harry Potter (although I think Fluffy is cute). There is absolutely no context, no supporting information. Time crunch? Everyone’s in a time crunch. Helpful resources? Which ones? HOW IS THE APPLICATION PROCESS DIFFICULT?

Also, what do someone’s hobbies, job, and personalily attributes have to do with this topic? Regina is “stubborn” (lol). HOW DOES THAT HELP US MAKE DECISIONS? It doesn’t.

Ah, it hurts me a little bit to see this persona, but IT’S OKAY. We live and learn.

Personas like these exist, and it’s no wonder that people hate them. As a tool, this is completely useless. It’s like, instead of a hammer to hit a nail, I just gave you a stick I found from a tree. A broken stick that’s been run over. These personas aren’t making anyone’s life easier.