My opinion on this is no, personas are largely overvalued, and might not bring the benefits that are expected. I’ve seen companies spending a huge amount of money to create personas that nobody ever looked at. When Alan Cooper introduced personas in his book The lunatics are running the asylum, he described a completely new way to design products where users’ need are the main focus, and that change was such an important step forward. But look at the way personas are used by organisation: are they really used as a way to create great designs? I doubt it.
I believe that while personas are rough tools that can be useful to some extent, activity-centered requirements, or scenarios, whatever we want to call them, are far more important, because they allow to foresee what people will look for and how they will try to accomplish their goals, in a specific context of use and starting from a specific situation. I don’t see how a good design solution can come out of accurate personas without a list of scenarios related to them.
Personas tend to be exhaustive where it’s not needed (demographics, names, pictures are not necessary most of the times), while they fail to summarise the complex variety of needs and usage scenarios that real users express in real life situations.
Despite that, personas have become very popular. I believe this is due to the fact that non designers who influence the business decisions and therefore the design, and among these, strategists and marketing people, see personas as tools familiar to what they are used to deal with. Therefore they are in favour of personas as a product development tool.
Many of these people foster the creation of personas with high expectations in mind and the desire to engage people, making sometimes valuable efforts, but unfortunately they are not used to think the way a designer should think, putting themselves in the users’s shoes. And the need to sell and to convince people is still stronger than the need of giving people what they need. When personas are developed in this context, far from an authentic design perspective, they end up being almost useless. How do you double check whether the design solutions you are choosing will really offer people what they need when they need it?
It’s interesting to see what Donald Norman says about activity-centered design:
Donald Norman: Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful
