I have spent 20 years in the design field. A few times, I relied on personas to help me creating better designs. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes, they were less efficient. With the raise of the Lean UX and the "job to be done" theory, I am looking at the variants on the personas theme, and what are the pros and cons of each, and what make them appropriate for a given context.

1. Should we kill personas?
Marine Barbaroux - @miss_embe
Head of UX, Red Gate
30 Apr 2014

2. image: hugh mcleod - @gapidvoid

3. image: Ben Melbourne - @benmel
1) the "cooper"
• Designed to create
empathy.
• Requires research up
front.
• They are not aligned with
MKT personas (MKT
comes after design)
• Sometimes, they were not
credible because they use
irrelevant details
• They are hard to keep up
to date
• They REQUIRE
CUSTOMERS to be
designed.

4. 2) the Lean UX ad-Hoc (or proto) personas
image: Jeff Gothelf
• Designed to create
alignement in the team.
• Assumes the customer is
an hypothesis like the
others.
• Quicker to do, but can
be very wrong, so you
need to check your
model exists --> there
are many more things to
check.
• Complexify hypothesis
(don't know if your
product or customers is
wrong).

5. images: @alanklement
3) No persona: Job stories instead of User stories
• Based on the "Job to
Be Done" theory.
• Claims personas are
reduced to
demographics that
don’t acknowledge
causality.
• Decouple
implementation with
motivations and
outcomes.
• Bring more context,
situations and anxiety.

6. image: (c) 1993 Steve McConnell
... but fundametaly, are they so different?

8. image: @miss_embe
product maturity
ad-hoc persona
persona
JTBD
timeline

9. • These tools are complementary
• Always keep an eye on your users/customers
• Keep an eye on their enviroment too: it might change their goals
• It doesn't matter what persona artifacts look like
• Understand the forces that drive your users/customers
• Modify your views and product accordingly
conclusion

10. www.cooper.com/journal/2014/04/barry-the-blog-post
asinthecity.com/2011/05/13/explaining-personas-used-in-ux-design----part-1/
asinthecity.com/2011/05/13/explaining-personas-used-in-ux-design----part-2/
www.udemy.com/ultimate-guide-to-ux/#/lecture/209590
www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/using-personas-for-executive-alignment/
jobstobedone.org/
insideintercom.io/using-job-stories-design-features-ui-ux/
Understanding the job by C.Christensen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84LymEs67Y
references