Why Personas Fail
The criticism that opened my eyes to the issues with Personas was this example from Alan Klement:<p>> Why did Alan buy the Snickers candy bar?<p>A. Alan is a thirty-five year old; has a degree in marketing; likes peanuts, chocolate, nougat, and caramel; loves Snickers, eats one every day; has an active lifestyle; drives a Honda; aims to retire from age 55<p>B. Satisfy his hunger<p>---<p>My other insight was that many UX firms treat artifacts like Personas as the deliverable. It is something concrete to show the value of the time and money spent doing research. But it is a deliverable that has almost no value to improving the product. The point of doing user research is to improve the product, not to produce a beautiful 20 page "research document". But translating user research from interview into fully-realized and delivered features is <i>hard</i>, and emailing a PDF of personas is comparably much easier.