How personas fail As Des discussed earlier, personas are often defined by attributes that have nothing to do with causality. For example, someone’s age, sex, race, and weekend habits doesn’t explain why they ate a Snickers bar. Having 30 seconds to buy and eat something which will stave off hunger for 30 minutes does explain it though. How user stories fail “As a user, I can indicate folders not to backup so my backup drive isn’t filled up with things I don’t need saved.” User stories, such as the one above, have three big problems: 1. They use personas. 2. They couple implementation with motivations and outcomes. 3. They ignore context, situations and anxieties. Features fail often. If a feature was defined by a user story, discovering why it failed will be difficult, because implementation was coupled with motivations and outcomes. Because of the coupling, how can anyone know what was wrong? Was the implementation wrong, or were the assumptions about the motivations wrong? 38