Personas will always have their place. If you want to create an advertisement that attracts 21-year- old men or 35-year-old professionals, personas will help create realistic representations of your target audience. But if you want to build a great software product, making crucial decisions based around a series of personality traits won’t get you there. That’s because products don’t match people; they match problems. We learned early the outcome a person wants is much more important than the person themselves. Knowing it’s a 37-year-old’s hands on the keyboard rarely changes how you design your product to deliver their outcome. By focusing on the job and the context of customers, you can develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do. That’s something a composite sketch of six different people just can’t achieve. • • • Personas are a tool for sharing a common vision of a target user with everyone on a project. When everyone knows the sort of end users being targeted, it helps cut out some unnecessary debates. A persona depicts what you need to know about a typical end user of your product to make informed design decisions. There are a few guidelines about how best to create, present and use them. Here are two important ones: No nonsense. Every sentence in a persona should have a design implication. For example, saying the user is 72 and often texts their nephews and nieces could imply you need to cater for diminished eyesight, low computer skills and consider outbound SMS messages. A shared creation. The project’s stakeholders have to be involved in both the research and analysis involved in creating them. Personas are the end result of a chunk of work. As Jared Spool says, they are similar to holiday postcards; they’re evidence a journey took place, but you can’t buy postcards and think you’ve been on holiday. Personas work well when the user base can be broken down into different types of users with different needs. But when you’re building a product, that’s not always the case. 6