Disentangling some ideas about personas

I've been reading a lot of debates and discussions around personas lately—whether they're an effective tool in interface design or not, and what is the right way to create them. I think when people write about personas they often blur together two ideas that are in fact separate. Personas are really a technique for synthesizing research data and presenting it in a sticky way. This is separate from the research methods used to gather the data.

Normally we use techniques like field studies, site visits and other qualitative research methods to gather data about how our users will interact with our products, what their needs and goals are, the environment they work in, etc. But there's no reason why findings from this sort of research need to be presented as personas. They could be presented in a number of other ways depending on the audience, purpose, skills of team members, etc.

The advantage of personas is that they present information in way that is clear, memorable, and actionable. Here's the important thing: you would get these same benefits regardless of the source of the information behind the personas. Normally people associate personas with the types of research mentioned above in order to get accurate or correct information about users, but getting correct information is really separate from presenting information in an effective way. Often people advocate for personas on the grounds that they are a good antidote for the elastic user and the "featuritis" that results from a lack of clear focus during design and development—but you get the benefits of increased focus regardless of whether the personas are backed by thorough qualitative research or by the hunches of front line staff.

So when people argue in favor of personas they're often really arguing several separate things:

1. That a certain type of information about users is needed to develop good products (namely information about goals, needs, attitudes, etc.)
2. That a certain type of (usually qualitative) research is the best way to obtain that information
3. That personas are the best way to synthesize the information after it's obtained and present it to the team working on designing and developing the product

Someone could reasonably object to any one of these points. By blurring them together under the concept of personas, it makes it difficult to understand that objection. It also makes persona adoption an all-or-nothing sort of thing, which may be harder to implement in an organization, and may also lead to missed opportunities (for example, an organization might miss out on the benefits of qualitative research because it is turned off by the idea of presenting that research as a persona).

Defending the book

Jay Cross (no relation to this author) recently posted some disparaging comments about The Book to explain why he won't be writing books anymore and will instead work on something called The Unbook. Like so many writers advocating for things like "Learning 2.0" and other shifts in the way we work, think, and learn based on Web 2.0 technologies and the ideas behind them, Cross makes a straw man out of the current way of doing things—in this case the humble book.

I'll pick one of his characteristics of The Book as an example: Passive Readers. Of course, passive readers is a bad thing and The Unbook is supposed to have "participants, not readers," which is a good thing. Nonsense. The fact that readers aren't involved in authoring a book doesn't mean that they're passive. We highlight passages, dog-ear pages, and write notes in the margins where we agree or disagree or just think of something else triggered by what we've read. We write reviews, or give talks, or write papers, or even write our own books in response to what we've read—not just in one book but in many different related books. Which also, actually, calls into question Cross's claim that The Book is "unlinked" and not "networked." Books are actually quite thoroughly networked through references and foot notes and bibliographies going back in time, and by being referenced and mentioned by other works going forward.

What a book provides is the time and space for an author to develop a complex, nuanced, subtle, sweeping connected series of thoughts and arguments to create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Some thinkers—and Cross doesn't say this but it seems to be lurking in the background—seem to believe that this whole can be equally well created through a series of evolving thoughts expressed in smaller doses all over the place, by multiple people working in multiple media. I just can't see it. Think of the scale of something like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Whatever you think of the arguments in that book, there's no denying the monumental amount of work involved in tying together so many ideas from so many distinct areas to create a consistent, comprehensive whole that expresses a theory that simply didn't exist in the individual parts. We have no medium for the creation and transmission of something like that other than the book.