Why Personas Don’t Represent Every User

I'd like to use these nested dolls to talk about a common misconception about personas, and it's a longstanding misconception, so I'm almost certain you will have heard it. I'll tell you about the dolls first. These are Ukrainian nested dolls, and I'm using them, as individual personas in a hypothetical system. So, these are two primary personas. That means they have different goals, different problems they want our solution to solve for them,

they have different behaviors and needs. This one is, Darina, and this one is Sophia. But obviously, being nested dolls, there's more to them than first appearances. Now, we've revealed a different dimension to our personas, and what I'd like to do is to pretend that the size represents a combination of skills and ability. The point with personas is that we really rarely define

a persona in terms of skill and ability, and even if we did, the diverse range of all users that are going to be engaged with our products is vast. You cannot possibly represent that in a single persona. It's just not achievable. And what I'd like to do is go a little bit further into this skills and abilities idea. The skills are things that people learn by and large,

so they are to a certain extent reliant on what people already know when they come to use your solution. They also rely on them learning, so learnability is a big issue when we're talking about skills. Ability, on the other hand, not entirely unrelated to skills, but it's more to do with your innate abilities. So, here we're talking about whether people find it easy to do slightly more advanced things like double-clicking the mouse. Used to be an advanced thing,

and it still is for some people. Right-clicking is an advanced thing and was, in the early days, something that people had to get used to doing. It still is considered to be, by the way, an advanced feature. You should never put primary activities on a right mouse click if you're talking about a desktop application. But it's interesting and useful to talk about the combination of skills and abilities because they do interact. So, here, the smaller dolls are meant to represent people with

less skill and less ability, and the larger ones, more skill and ability. The point is that when you're defining a persona, you may say something about frequency of use or how experienced that particular persona is in general, but you're still not describing the whole range of frequencies of use and skills. You can't do that. That's—that's not what the persona is for. The personas are for

giving focus. So, you give some focus on skill and ability, but usually very little focus on that. The main focus is on the problems they have and the solutions you're providing. So, what are their needs and behaviors? We often say nothing about their skills and abilities, but you have a set of responsibilities. You have responsibilities to your organization to produce a successful product. You have responsibilities to your wider range of users who may not fit

your persona but are still sitting in front of your product. You don't want to make a bad user experience for them. They're just not the focus of your persona. And similarly, we might, if our persona, typical persona, is somewhere in the middle range, which it often is, and we want to make sure that we're actually targeting more expert users, or maybe our persona is more expert, we might say that in the persona they're a frequent user or they're already well experienced. Then we adjust the user interface accordingly. Weshouldn't be making it impossible for people with

less skills or experience to do what they need to do, but we might provide, for example, shortcuts, things like right mouse clicks on objects is a one very popular way of doing that. So, using personas is not intended to give you a lot of information on skills and abilities. They are separate dimensions. You need to consider those at all points, whether you're using personas or not.

The personas are there to give focus on a particular set of users, specifically a subset of your users who you want to build a solution to wow or delight, and for the rest of those users, you want to provide at least a good user experience, if not an outstanding one.

It is illegal to produce products and  services that discriminate against certain groups of users, typically those  with disabilities or those of older age. But that's really just the tip of  the iceberg. The thing is that we can't use personas to represent this vast  range of user skills and abilities. Now, there are things we can do. We have to  recognize that a disability, in particular,

has its solutions, and there are many, many ways  of making systems more usable by those with either long-term or short-term impairments.  This is one of the big issues with disability: that almost everybody in their lives has got  some kind of disability at some time. So, the WCAG from the World Wide Web Consortium, if you  comply with those guidelines, and you have a very good chance of making sure that your systems will  work for some of these less-abled people.

When we're talking about people with lower skills, then  using simple English, using a simple structure, having a clear conceptual model that's  well communicated through the interface, all helps people who really are perhaps just not  getting it. They're not that advanced in their use of technology, or they simply haven't been using  the kind of application that you're now presenting them with. So, we can make adjustments. We can  address people, with these reduced

skills and abilities. Gestures—not fond,  because touch screens don't like older people because of their dry skin, and in some cases,  in many cases to be honest, older users start to lose manual dexterity, so things like gestures  become problematic. Younger children can struggle with the motor skills required. I suspect they're  getting better and better at this, but you still might need to be very careful about what you do  for anyone who's maybe under the age of 10 or 12.