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The problem I have with personas, what I recommend instead, and how you can actually use them together to articulate user information more clearly.

Overview

Most people starting in their UI/UX career get hit with personas right out of the gate. It’s almost a rite of passage for designers looking to get into the product space, and personas do have their place and time.

Before we go any further, I want to clarify that I am not saying personas are somehow an “inferior” method of articulating user needs data to teams, but what I am saying is that jobs to be done generally works better for that specifically.

Today, I am going to share with you the problem I have with personas, what I recommend instead, and how you can actually use them together to articulate user information more clearly.

What are personas?

Personas are essentially a data-based aggregate of who your target user “is,” as represented by a fictitious identity.

These personas often include:

• Who this person “is”
• Name, gender, age, cohort group
• Likes
• Dislikes
• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Behavioral data
• What they’re “looking for” (not outcomes but feelings, can be hard to pin down accurately)
• How they interact with current solutions

These personas are created in order to give the team references for different types of users, build empathy, and generally attempt to guide product design/development in a positive direction.

Sounds good, yeah? Well, this is where things get a little dicey.

The problem with personas

In my experience, personas are really good at making you and your team think you know your users when you actually don’t.

In many cases, it’s treated as a box to be ticked, artifacts to be made/forgotten about, and pieces of paper that are meant to be pointed at and said “how would _____________ feel about XYZ?” (in terms of the product).

“But I don’t understand,” product teams say, “we did the research, made the personas, drafted specs, all that fun jazz, but our engagement is on the ground, why?”

It’s because personas focus on the “people,” but not on the thing that actually gets those people to use your product or solution.

But let me show you a framework that actually does:

Enter Jobs-to-be-done

Jobs-to-be-done may just be one of my single favorite approaches to understanding user needs in a way that is actually helpful to them because of two things:

1. It uncompromisingly focuses on process/outcomes, and
2. The results are straightforward to test and benchmark.

Let me show you what I’m talking about:

• What do our customers need/want and why do they need/want it?
• What currently exists and what outputs are they getting from them?
• How can we help get them from where they are to where they really want to be in the best way possible?

See what I mean? Straightforward, all killer, no filler, and it starts with why.

• Why does your user want what they want?
• What are they really after?

You might not know how Aaron or Sally feel about a certain feature, but you can know pretty well just by observing whether or not your product is delivering on the results that your users came to your for in the first place.

Working upward from why, and using the outcomes to be had (or jobs to be done) as your guideposts, you are able to effectively separate signal from noise, and help design a solution that actually delivers desired outcomes for your users.

How to use them together

Now as I mentioned before, this is not to say that you can’t use personas in tandem with jobs to be done, and frankly it will probably result in a much clearer picture of your users for your and your team.

By matching jobs to be done with persons, you can get a very detailed view of exactly what your target users/customers are looking for, why they’re looking for it, and how you can help deliver these outcomes in a way that exceeds expectation.

Bringing it all together

So what does all of this mean for you?

1. Personas alone are a poor substitute for effective research/product planning, and can deliver less than optimal results for you and your team.
2. Jobs to be done focuses on what your users need/want and why they need/want it.
3. Using jobs to be done in conjunction with personas can give you a much clearer picture of who your users are and how you can better serve them.