 started. Okay so table of contents for today are agenda today I'm hoping that we can try to answer these four questions. I would hope so. We stand here awkwardly. No. You know what? Let's do this one. Okay yeah we'll do a stand-up version. Take my wife. Okay. So we'll just balance it out here. I'm hoping that through the course of this session we can answer the following four questions. Starting with who am I and why should you listen to me? Where did personas come from? Why do I think they should die? And what should you do instead? So we'll do a poll at the end to see if I've been successful in answering any of these questions. So who am I and why should you listen to me? So my name is Elliott Maurer. I'm the head of product at Media Current. I am a strategy and design guy, crossword puzzle aficionado. And if I sound like I'm really passionate about what I'm talking about today I'm working on that in therapy. I've been working in the world of digital product development for about the last 10 years and I'm really super passionate about shipping product but I'm also equally interested in the way we make what we make. As I said I am the head of product at Media Current and we are an open source product agency who define designs and delivers websites platforms and digital experiences that are backed by open source technology. But for us it's more about the ethos of open source giving back to the community and collaborating across our entire way of working. So the title of this session is death to personas. And I will be honest with you that I came up with this as kind of a joke at last year's DrupalCon and then I realized I kind of wanted to talk about this a little bit more and even when I submitted the the session proposal to DrupalCon I thought well they're totally not gonna pick this one up because I wanted it to be a little bit a little bit controversial and to address something that has sort of been bothering me for for a bit. And that is doing things like an octopus. Here we go. So if you open a a book about user experience design or you take a course online or you read an article on medium or something to that end you're gonna come across the concept of user personas and they often look like this. So this is me as a user persona. And I realized that it's really biased to make user persona for yourself. You probably shouldn't do that. And that's not what the session is about. But what can we take from this user persona of me? I primarily use the laptop but I do have a smartphone. I really like donuts and frequent flyer miles. I gave myself a four on the technical scale. And I really hate using HBO Max. Which is now called Max. The one to watch. But what does this tell you about my decision making process or how I as user want to access or engage with information. So as I said you probably shouldn't do this and make user persona for yourself. But the reality and what I want to talk about today is that user personas have become such an accepted part of what we do in experience user experience design that we've kind of lost the thread of why we started doing what we started doing and what they are really designed to help us to do. So I know this is really hard to believe. But once upon a time there was no such thing as software. What we think of as a software today really has not been a thing for all that long. Really wasn't until the early 1980s that software development started to become commercialized. So for the first 40 years of software development we had a lot of developers who were building things to see if they could and then building things for other developers. And then in the 1980s we all of a sudden had this concept of commercially viable software that was created for non developers to use. And so enter this guy. So this is Alan Cooper. And he was the originator of visual basic which he sold to Microsoft in 1988. And after that he was a very sought after freelance designer and developer. And then he opened his own design consultancy in 1992 called Cooper. And Alan Cooper believed that the software developers of the time were not adequately kind of centering the needs of the users when they were building what they were building. They were basically building stuff for themselves and they were building things for other developers. And if other rando non developer people used it to that was kind of cool. So then software became more commercialized. And as software use became much more commonplace. There were a bunch of products that basically only developers knew how to use. And this made software adoption really really slow. And because not everybody was a developer. So when Cooper was working on his own in the 1980s and the 90s he invented the concept of user personas by interviewing people interviewing the intended users of a product and getting to know them so well that he would actually pretend to be them while he was working. There is the concept of an idea story of Cooper creating the character of Kathy not Kathy from the cartoon but you get it. So he created this character of Kathy and he would actually have conversations with her as he was developing. We don't know if she was a real person or if she was a composite person. But as he transition from being a hands on developer into consulting he realized that this concept of user personas kind of it had a lot of meat to it. It was really was really compelling because it was about what was it about. Okay. It's less about talking to yourself while writing code and more about kind of creating an artifact that would communicate the research that you did and the folks you talk to and their needs and dispelling that out to disseminating that out to the rest of the team because not everybody on your team gets to go out and do research. So what Cooper was doing in the early to mid 1990s was kind of awesome. But here we are in 2023. And I don't know if you've heard but a lot of stuff has happened with computers. So I made this really not academic and very biased timeline to talk a little bit about that. So 1984 we have Apple releasing the Macintosh which was the first commercially viable personal computer with a graphical user interface or a GUI. And then in 1988 a guy named Don Norman who was actually a cognitive scientist at Apple. He wrote this book called The Design of Everyday Things which every user experience designer has pretended to read. And then in 1989 we have the first version of Microsoft Word for Windows 3. And a really interesting fact about this is that they have not made any updates to it since. And in 1991 we have the first version of Photoshop. So the field of graphic design shifts from the world of print into the world of interaction and experience. And then in 1995 that guy Don Norman he creates the concept or comes up with the phrase user experience to design to describe the things that people are doing in this space. So 1997 Steve Jobs resurrects Apple with the creation of the iMac and revolutionizes industrial design for computing. In that 2001 he puts a computer in everybody's pocket with the iPod. And then 2007 that computer all of a sudden has the internet in everybody's pocket. So aside from being forced to use Microsoft Word the way that we interact with technology is very different today than it was in the 1990s. So that makes us ask the question are user personas as useful today as they were when they were first developed. So as I said Alan Cooper was on to something when he created the concept of user personas as personal computing and commercialized software entered daily life. The entire and then the entire world went through this crazy paradigm shift and how we interact with pretty much everything has changed. So why do I think that user personas should die. There is one very significant difference in the way that we approach designing and developing products today that just was not true in the 80s and much of the 90s. And that is that we are all users. So we use software we use websites we use native apps we use digital kiosks we are interacting with technology constantly. We have experience with established interaction paradigms I'm sure that many of the people in this room could draw the interfaces of Spotify or Instagram from memory. And user personas were fundamentally about building empathy for people who were having experiences interacting with technology that are very different from our own experience. And to a large extent that is no longer our reality. Our parents our grandparents our children all have pretty much deep experience pretty deep experience interacting with technology. But there is a second and very important sort of extension of this thought. And that is that while we are all users we are not our users. So we are fundamentally creating things that are generally intended for people who are not us. So we have to approach creating them with sort of an equal mix of empathy and objectivity. So if we are still trying to develop empathy why are user personas not the right way to do it. In my opinion the process for creating user personas should should be something like this. You identify who your users are. And then you go out and you talk to them. And then you take all the things that you learned and you synthesize that in to something and then through that you create a user persona. But the problem is that research is time consuming and sometimes it's hard to find your users let alone to book time with them and to write a research protocol and conduct an interview or an observation session to synthesize the results and then to create a user persona. So a lot of teams just do this. So even on their best day user personas are representative averages focusing on the most common denominators of a group. So if we say that most users are male they are between or they are male identified. They are between the ages of 18 and 34. They mostly use smartphones. What what does this tell us. What about the users who are none of those things. Are we not designing for them. What about a user who identifies as male is 25 is using a mobile device. But he has a motor disability. How are we accounting for his specific needs. When we end up lumping all of the non most users into the category of edge cases and we all know that edge cases go to die at the bottom of the backlog. So on the flip side of this we have hyper specific personas. A lot of the personas that I've seen in my experience are kind of like this. This is my sister. I did not ask for her permission. I just told her. So these are more like marketing personas and I think they can be really helpful for things like content strategy or buying ads but they're not as useful when we're creating web experiences. You get a lot of details about this imagined person or my sister. But at the end of the day how are we using this information. How are we using the fact that my sister has three kids that she's married that she lives in a suburb that she is not necessarily an early adopter of technology like how are we actually taking these data points and using them to to inform the products that we make. So in the same way that we are generalizing our users into most common that limits our ability to see the people that are outside of the margins and we have these hyper specific personas then we're leaving everybody else out of the conversation. So creating user personas in the traditional format has forced us to make some really kind of weird and I think very limiting decisions about the kind of people that we're building for and what we're trying to do is build empathy and understanding. These are things that I really think we need to consider. How many digital products need to be gender specific. Does that really matter for the kind of experience that we're often building. How are we accounting for a spectrum of abilities. We should be baking in accessibility into the experience because not just because it benefits people who have disabilities but it benefits everybody in a world of responsive design to specifying devices really matter. Something that we're building should work across every single interface that we're designing for and ones we haven't even imagined exist yet like those weird Apple things that came out yesterday. Is demography destiny or can we separate the idea of actions that we take from the stats that might appear on a baseball card. So what do we do instead. Talk to users not developing user personas does not mean that you give up on the idea of talking to users. So if you were developing user personas without talking to users before please start. I will not judge you too harshly. You need to talk to users early and you need to talk to users often but you do not ask users what they want. Because what people want and what people need are often two very oddly different things. And while people will tell you what they want they will not tell you what they need because they mostly do not know. So how do you know what to talk to people about. So sometimes it can be really hard to write a research protocol especially if you're creating something brand new. I like to do an assumption mapping exercise because it helps you frame up the questions that you need to have addressed. So you can do an assumption mapping exercise by yourself. I prefer to do it in a group but it works a little bit like this. You're going to create a two by two matrix with the least important to most important on the what is that the X axis or is that the Y axis. That's the Y axis did not do very well math and the most difficult to least difficult to validate on the X axis. So that's our that's our matrix there. When we think about what's most important these are the things that are key to the experience that we are are making. So if we do not prove them to be valid assumptions our experience will not work but we want them to be the most easy to validate. So the things that we can frame questions around. So let's say that you are designing an experience for an art museum where people are going to upload selfies and you will turn them into art. So what are the assumptions that you have about the people that you're creating this experience for. First we might assume that these people like art or they like the idea of turning themselves into art and then we assume that they take selfies and then most importantly we probably assume that they are going to want to upload these selfies to the app that we're making or the website that we're making. Because if they don't do these things the thing that we're making is not going to work at all. These are also the things that are most important to us and the easiest to find out. So we might assume that these people are also interested in sharing their results outside of the product and that's probably true but not validating this doesn't really have much impact on whether or not the product will be successful. So we make it that easy we're going to put that in the easy to validate but less important to us to find out. We might also assume that these people would tell their friends about the product and we can ask about that but it's one of those things that until they actually are doing it we don't know that they will. So you can ask somebody that kind of question will you share this with a friend and they might say yes but then when in reality you spend a bunch of time figuring out how to build a share mechanism into your app and then nobody ever uses it. I'm not speaking from personal experience. And lastly another one of the really hard questions to answer is actually if somebody's going to pay for it. So you can ask this a thousand different ways a thousand different times but until somebody's actually in the in the position to buy something it's not something that you can really 100% validate. This is something what's interesting about this is that this might be the most important thing for us to think about if we're thinking about this as a money maker but it's the hardest thing for us to validate. So we're still focusing on the things that are in that upper right hand quadrant of most important and easy to validate. It doesn't mean that we don't frame our research around all of these things but we're really focused on that first quadrant. So we go out and we validate those assumptions by talking to potential users. We're going to end up by answering just these three questions not only with insights about the functionality that we're building but about how these people intend to use the product that we're building. And that is really that the how has become much more important to me in my opinion than the who. So for the most part when users are engaging with the digital product they are trying to accomplish something. They might be trying to find a flight or buy a toaster or connect with a friend or share their experience. And if we can identify what we think these primary actions are we can define a user mindset for them and the cool thing about user mindsets is that anybody can have them. So the mindset of someone who is passively watching something is very different from the mindset of somebody who is actively searching for something. And the mindset of someone who is playing a game is very different than the mindset of somebody who is buying a vacuum cleaner. Our design and development decisions are about making it easier simpler more engaging for user to reach their goals whatever those goals may be. So if we're building an experience for somebody to learn a new skill what are the things that we want to be thinking about? We want to be thinking about whether learning is a primary action. I'm assuming that if we are building something to learn a new skill that is our primary action. We are wondering about how long does that action take? How many steps are in that process? Are the steps logical? Are there any distractions in the process? Are the intentional distractions or otherwise? How satisfying is the end result? How do we want people to feel when they've actually accomplished what we're designing? Is the process repeatable? Is it something that they do again and again and again or is it something that they go through one time and that's it? And can the process be completed in one session or do you want people coming back to the product? The things that we do not really care about are their gender, age, physical or cognitive ability, device type, location, education, income, marital status, hobbies or interest or brand affiliations. They do not matter for the thing that we are building. It should just work and it should just be awesome no matter what. So back to Alan Cooper. I found this photo of him when I was doing research for this session because he wrote an article about how people hate user personas and his thesis for that article is very similar to mine ultimately. He created personas because he wanted products, the products that he was making to be more human centered and to deliver the most value and satisfaction and at the end of the day whether you continue to create user personas or not you can't create products for people without trying to understand the people that you create those products for. It's not ultimately about the tool, it is about an intentional thoughtful and empathetic process that evolves as people and technology do. All right, that's all I got. Any questions? Thank you, thank you. I think they will be a part of whatever is released on whatever but I can also... Actually we're going to be publishing a medium article on mediacurrent.medium.com that will have the presentation and maybe some other maybe some b-sides. Yes? Yes, yes. So the thing that I think is interesting about that is that it shouldn't be complicated either. Like I think we have to figure out a way to establish, you know, we're not reinventing the wheel. If those of you who were in the session that Jay and I from media current presented yesterday about our Ignite product, it's not, it is about like finding the commonalities and experiences and making those commonalities accessible to people, like making them the standard. You do have to take into account like, you do have to take into account some ability, but number one we found, and there's been a lot of studies on this actually, that was a well actually moment. I'm not going to mansplain this, but there have been a lot of studies that people's capacity to understand digital interfaces is much higher than we expect, but those interfaces still have to be intuitive. Intuitiveness is not dependent on skill. It's dependent on sort of something else. Anybody can also learn an interface as well. So we don't want to put things in places that don't make sense and we don't want to make processes overly encumbered and overly complicated, but one thing I think is super important, if you are design, if you're designing a product that is specifically aimed at like a demographic, what is more important than a user persona is actually the user testing and and usability testing with your cohort. Because you're actually gonna, even if you have a user persona and you you got that user persona by virtue of talking to those people, you still made that user persona up and you're still intuiting like what they would do. What you should do is make a thing in whatever format that you want, whether that's paper prototype, Figma prototype, code prototype, and put it in front of the intended user and see what they do. Yes, thank you, yes. Have a whole bookshelf in my apartment dedicated to my wife, maybe separate the books. Yeah, I think so. What I like design thinking, I'm definitely like a student of like IDO and and those folks. But I think what the, there is a world where I, does methodologies and the ideology becomes dogmatic. And I think what's important and what those methodologies are really about was like being inquisitive and like actively engaging with the means of creation. And one thing I like to bring into our practice is if something is not working for you, like it's just not working for your process, like why are you still doing it? And our deliverables as strategists should not just be boxes to check, they should be things that are moving the work forward and moving the team forward and helping make decisions. And if you're just doing something for the sake of doing it, you're not doing it well. This is fun. What else? Yeah, yeah. That was the easiest question. Yeah, we don't do user personas. We used to, we used to do them a lot and they were a part of all of the projects that we did and clients love them and I get it, people love them. It's fun to make fake people. But when you say like that's not a part of our practice and what we, we are still going to talk to people, we're still going to tell you what those people said and we're going to make decisions based on the users that we're making them for and then we're going to make some prototypes and we're going to take them back and talk to people and we're going to use the inputs from real users to make the product better. They don't miss the fake people anymore. I would throw all the methods away. Start over. Reinvent everything. Yes. Make my team answer this question. Yeah, so one thing that I, that I like to do and that I recommend is, you know, you're going to, when you talk to people, you're going to have themes that come out of the conversations. And those themes, they might translate into, we'll use something called experience principles, which is really sort of like what are the core nouns or verbs that we're trying, or adjectives that we're trying to put across in an experience. The experience should be expansive. The experience should be inclusive, is sort of baked into it. But that gives you a much more in the same way that like, you know, when, when Alan Cooper was developing personas and when personas became popular, it was because people could say, well, you know, what would Cathy do? What would Jennifer do? And that's cool. But now we don't have to do that because we can say, like, is the experience inclusive enough? Does it feel adventurous enough? Does it feel, you know, what are the things we're trying to, to create across the experience in, in design, in the features, and whatever. And it becomes, it becomes like a smaller, more easier keyword or catchphrase to use, which is why I kind of like, like that photo of Alan Cooper saying like personas suck, but this other thing that we're going to say is not personas, it's better. It's not like I'm saying I've created this brand new idea and it's going to revolutionize the way that we think about people. There are so many other tools you can use that, that like convey what you've learned from people that make it easier to, to sell that information more broadly and, and develop consensus and like build support for what you're making and it doesn't have to be just this one format. Yes. Do I have an opinion on those? I have an opinion on everything. I don't necessarily think that anything is, I just did a whole presentation on how personas should die and I don't think anything's bad. I like how might we statements better because I think it's more, I like to focus more on the solution than the problem. I think it's important to frame the problem. I think it's important to have commonality or consensus around what the problem is and then I think it's much more interesting to focus on you know, how might we make this experience better for increasing enrollment? How might we decouple our understanding of whatever this from this and then because any kind of solution can be attributed, like you can answer that question in so many different ways. So I like to focus more on that but if problem statements are working for you, keep doing them. It's sort of like Catskills vibe here. Anything else? Yes? I'm trying to get this. Yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah, because like realistically, realistically, how different are those audiences? If at the end of the day they're trying to get the data and they're trying to get the data in whatever format that they want, like how different are they? There might be, the congressional aides might be 22 years old and make $35,000 a year and sleep in somebody's office. Maybe. And a farmer might not but like how different are they at this point with varying levels of experience with technology? Well in increased experience with technology, like how different are they? We did a site recently for state agricultural authority and we talked to the, when we talked to the client, you know, we were really like who are your users? Like who are the users of a state agricultural authority? And you make a lot of generalizations about farmers and you make a lot of generalizations about like them not being digital first and you make a lot of generalizations about them being like, you know, family farmers who are in their 80s who are on a tractor and maybe they are. We actually learned that like, yes, they are family farmers, they are in their 80s, they are on a tractor and they all have smartphones. And so all the things that we would have sort of generalized about who we think these users are and how we want to solve for them, we didn't have to solve anything differently for an 80 year old family farmer who accesses his website on his phone on a tractor, then a 22 year old who's trying to license their pet breeding company who's also using the website on their phone. Like, it's the same experience and it should be the same experience and it should work equally as well for both of them and they should both know how to use it and have no issues. Try the veal. I just love that this is gonna be on some YouTube and there's gonna be no context. Yeah. All right. Anything else I can answer for anyone? We're always gonna stare at each other for like 20 minutes. That's fine too. Oh yeah. Okay, a poll. Who's gonna... Do you know who I am and why you should listen to me? No. What's the vibe? How are people feeling about it? Is everyone like, yes, we were never gonna use user personas again. If you're still gonna do user personas, raise your hand. That's fine. I won't judge you. And if I have successfully convinced you that this is outmoded, raise your hand. I'm counting you. I'm counting you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You still need to... You still need to talk to the people. You still need to figure out what they are doing or what you want them to do. Do you wanna support the behaviors that they're engaging in or do you want to take them in a different direction? I just think that like the process... This literally just came from me being mad about the stupid cards, like the stupid people and the brand affiliations and the arbitrary scales of like, oh, you got a 12 on internet. Cool. And then I had to come up with a whole broader point around it. But yeah, I think it's more about why are you doing what you're doing? Number one, is what you're doing serving your process? Is what you're doing serving the people that you're doing it for? Like if you're making these amazing user personas but your product sucks, you should spend more time over here and less time over here. So it's really just about that. Yep. There is. Family? Yeah, actually. There is, there has been some research. There's an article it's from, it's a little old, but I quote it all the time from Nielsen Norman, who I don't 100% agree with all of the time. But five to seven is the magical number and that's what we do. So you don't just do five to seven like if I stood out in front of the convention center and I just counted to five and I talked to those people and that would be my statistical significance. You want to be intentional about the five to seven like who are you actually talking to? But we don't do more user interviews than that to start the process. We might do more user testing and it might be easier to get if you're doing a prototype testing or you're testing against like a staging environment easier to get that out to more people. But in terms of user research and user interviews, there has been some research that like basically after that seventh person the amount of new information it limits the amount of new information that you're getting. Yes, yeah. I really like that. We, I really, I really like that and I'm like excited to see as we're moving into a post COVID existence if we can do more of that. I think it's really important to see how people use products in context because even if you are talking to somebody and you know, we're a remotely distributed company. So we have the virtue of like we can show up anywhere like remotely as we all have for the last several years. But when you're watching somebody like let's say we're designing a website for a university library. How many students are going to be using that on their personal devices can we go and like watch them use it? Can we watch them use a library catalog, catalog search on on computers in the library and see what happens? Can we we passively observe that? I think watching people use products in context adds another layer of interest in the things you learn. Especially like if you're doing a mobile product or if you're doing something that has a physical digital crossover like you're creating an experience for some physical space you have to go to the physical space to get the sense of what it is that happens there. Like even if the product you're making it's not necessarily related to that. We're working on a project for an art museum. We had to go to the art museum. We had to see what the art museum was like understand the space and understand the relationship between things because you don't want your digital experience to be vastly disconnected from your physical experience. If the two things don't look like they go together then it's very confusing but it also doesn't serve either side of the product. The people who are going to the museum who use the website are super confused and the people who go to the museum first and then go to the website after like that doesn't reflect their experience. So you have to make sure that those things are sort of like in they're in the same house and they look like they have the same kind of you know like they belong together. I love watching weirdos using technology in real life. It's fun. Yes. Yeah. I so I was struggling with that. I do think that there is a flavor of this that is useful for advertising and marketing and particularly like ad buying. I don't know that it needs. I don't know that it still needs to be kind of fake people. Like I think that this weird world of like this is Sally Smith and she is 37 and she went to Dartmouth. Like I don't care but I think these are the I didn't exercise. I was thinking about throwing in here. I didn't exercise for a product where and this is on the product development side. Like we had a map of demographic attributes for a product that we were building and we sat down and we decided which ones were relevant to us. Like do we care if we're targeting specific gender. Do we care if we're targeting specific specific income level. Do we care if we're targeting level of education and we kind of like mapped out what was important to us. And then we framed our research questions about like that particular demographic of people. And that was interesting to go super deep into that like specific very specific person. And that was really important for the product we were building to have an ad campaign and to have like specific to show up in specific places in both PR and both and paid media. So I think it's I think it's okay for marketing people to use personas. I'm not I don't love it. I don't love the idea of like things being super gender based or things being super like age based because I think you get into some weird corners of like slightly non inclusive non inclusivity. And that's not even getting into sort of like the race piece of it. But there's still there could be still some value to it. All right. Cool. We good. Thanks.