Comments on: Assumptive Personas

By: ABC123

ABC123 — Sat, 25 May 2013 08:37:41 +0000

If your clients have the money for research and real personas, that’s great…but many of us aren’t fortunate enough to work with clients who have deep pockets. It’s better to make fictional “target”-personas than to do nothing at all. I love how people like Tomer Sharon reward Cessna for their great work with personas, and then scoff at startups that aren’t doing “real”research.
Look, the fact that you interviewed 30 people means nothing. Come back to me when you did legit high-level interviews with 1/10th of the number of clients you expect to have.
Basing your personas on even 100 people doesn’t mean you did any research if your target audience is millions. It just means you billed your clients more money and sold them on the idea that this was worthwhile.

By: Vu Thi Quynh Giao

Vu Thi Quynh Giao — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:34:04 +0000

That’s so true. Most of the so-called “target audience” brainstorming sessions are all about playing with our assumptions, even prejudices.

By: Andrew Wirtanen

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:23:34 +0000

Agreed, of course.

One of my major critiques of Gothelf’s Lean UX is that it teaches how to create proto-personas, but it doesn’t teach you how to build personas from real data. Gothelf stresses validating your assumptions, but he does not go into depth regarding validating personas.

That said, I will argue all day that assumptive personas (or ad-hoc personas, etc.) are still better than having no direction at all when designing. For example, if you have five hours of total upfront “UX” time, a complex product with many users types, and a tight timeline, sometimes the most effective thing you can do is sketch out assumptive personas and design for them. It’s still a huge risk, but at least you can base your design decisions on something.

Assumptive personas can also be helpful as a first step to developing real personas. Surveys can be developed to validate/invalidate the assumptive personas and identify any overlooked personas.

But, yes, these things are very dangerous when they get in the wrong hands.