Remember “Sarah, 34, marketing manager who values efficiency”?
Yeah, your team referenced her exactly once. During the kickoff slide deck.
I’ve created personas for 15 years. Here’s what actually happens: we spend weeks researching. We print them on posters, we put them on Confluence. We name them. We give them stock photo faces.
Then, in every single design decision, someone says “what would users want?” and nobody mentions Sarah.
Because Sarah isn’t a real person.
She’s a composite. An average.
And designing for averages means designing for nobody.
One time, I overheard a team argue about button placement for an hour. Their persona board was literally hanging on the wall behind them. Nobody looked at it.
You know what works better? Specific problems from specific people.
Not “Sarah values efficiency.” But “50 customers abandoned checkout because they couldn’t find shipping costs.”
Not demographics, but documented behaviours.
Personas make stakeholders feel like we did research. They make workshops feel official. But I’ve never seen a designer pull up a persona document mid-sprint and actually change a decision.
Stop creating them if you’re not gonna use them. Instead, start collecting a list of jobs-to-be-done. I guarantee you that JTBDs will work better.