Resurrecting Dead Personas

Being a user-centered designer means that you deliberately seek out the stories, data, and rationale behind your users’ motivations. You endeavor to keep user concerns at the forefront of every design decision, and regularly conduct research and collect data.

But collecting facts about users isn’t the same as knowing your users. Research and data need to be regularly aggregated, analyzed, and synthesized into a format that is both understandable and accessible at critical moments. You need to turn user facts into user wisdom, and one of the most common methods for doing this is to develop user personas.

Type “how to build user personas” into your favorite search engine and you will get thousands of results outlining different templates and examples of personas. Across the tech industry, personas “put a human face on aggregated data,” and help design and product teams focus on the details that really matter. Studies have shown that companies can see 4x the return on investment in personas, which explains why some firms spend upwards of $120,000 on these design tools.