Why primary personas are not your average user
– posted October 15th, 2006 by John Wood No comments
The problem with personas is that they are a deceptively easy concept to grasp. Too many people think they know the technique, but get it wrong, wrong, wrong. They read a bit of Alan Cooper and immediately grasp the power of the technique, but a few of the most essential concepts seem to go straight over many people’s heads.
For example, today I was reading about the The Role of Personas In Successful Scenario Design on the Future Now website. Future Now are a consulting company set up by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, who have written some highly-regarded books on web and content design. Anyway, they have a section on their personas page entitled The Myth of the Primary Persona in User Centered Design, in which they say:
A primary challenge of traditional user-centered design (UCD) is that after creating diverse and distinct personas, most design efforts focus on the primary persona. That’s like building a supermarket for people who are 5ft. 5in. tall, because that’s the average height of American females.
Like so many others, the authors have misconstrued Cooper’s concept of the primary persona. Designing for a primary persona is not a matter of discarding profiles of diverse users to focus on an ‘average’ user. If they are getting this wrong, then they are missing one of the central insights that drove the development of Cooper’s Goal-Directed ® design method.
The importance of designing for specific goals
One of the key insights in Cooper’s work is the central importance he places on designing for a specific set of user goals. He realised that something designed for specific goals was more likely to be excellent in its intended role. Something designed for everyone is subject to too many competing requirements and is in danger of satisfying no one at all.
The classic example of this is the roll-on suitcase, which was designed for the very specific needs of air crew. They needed a small bag for overnight stays, that could be easily manoeuvred on and off an aircraft, stowed in an overhead bin and wheeled rather than carried along endless airport corridors. Air crew where the primary persona for this product, and as a result of this focus the product is a truly excellent design. In fact, it’s so good that almost every frequent flier owns one. Paradoxically, something designed for the specific needs of a primary persona is much more likely to see wide adoption, simply because it is more likely to be an excellent design.
So, myth busted: far from representing an ‘average’ user, primary personas represent the most important user goals. But the people at Future Now are not the only ones who have made this mistake. In fact, it’s alarmingly common to hear people say that a primary persona represents the lowest common denominator in design. Why has this misunderstanding become so widespread?
The missing concept: Interfaces
I suspect that the reason so many people misunderstand the role of primary personas is the often misquoted rule of thumb that states that a product should have one primary persona and perhaps one or two secondary personas. What Cooper actually said is that each interface should have one primary persona, but any given product may have several such interfaces.
We can see this in operation if we look at the case study on the design of an aircraft entertainment system set out in The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Cooper shows in that example that there were three interfaces in the product – one for ground crew, one for flight crew, and one for passengers. Each of these had a primary persona that was the focus of design.
Where the guys at Future Now are going wrong is in looking at their supermarket example as one interface. A better interpretation would be to look at those parts of the shopping experience that relate to one type of user as an interface, though there’d be other types of user and other interfaces.
So don’t listen to Future Now, primary personas are a central benefit of using this technique. They help you focus your design efforts on specific needs. Similarly, interfaces are a much overlooked aspect of Cooper’s technique. They help fight feature creep by relating every part of the product to a specific user and their goals. If you try to serve everyone equally in every aspect of a design, you will have no real sense of priority or conceptual integrity to bring to your work.
