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Note: I voluntarily focused on the worst aspects of personas in this writing. Of course, I am aware that they can be useful when used correctly and great when designing for specific products.

Personas were popularized by Alan Cooper in 1999. Since then, they have become a standard tool in many fields, including design. Almost every designer uses—or has used—personas, regardless of their sector.

In user-centered design and marketing, a persona is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.

”There are five different personalities, screw unalike people.”

Having a personality summary of your users is priceless while designing and solving problems for them—no doubt about that. But in some ways, it can facilitate the designer’s work too much and make them slip into unconscious errors.

If you rely on just two to five different personalities (the average), you will fool yourself. It brings delusional self-confidence because you “nailed it” at satisfying those few personalities, but in reality, you are deliberately forgetting a lot of people.

I am aware that personas try to cover the widest range of personalities to create a broad panel, assuming other personalities will just be nuances of the ones selected. But that is not how it works. No, there are no “5 alpha personalities” and “4 billion beta personalities” which are just nuances.

Each person is different. There are obviously similarities, but they are not as common as persona users believe. If you truly think that, you are stereotyping a huge bunch of people.

The trap of similarity

For example, let’s picture a persona: a woman in her 20s who listens to pop music, loves TV shows, cinema, and photography, and leads an overcharged life. She has a specific personality captured by her persona.

It would be great if we stopped there. But sadly, in most cases, we don’t.

The designer will wrongly assume that another woman with similar tastes and hobbies has the exact same expectations and needs toward a product. However, these two women likely have different expectations and usage patterns. Finding similarities does not mean they are the same. You can’t work that way; if you do, you are hiding behind a biased persona.

Personas have caused trouble in the video game industry. For a long time, game designers built games for a stereotype: the teenage white boy. This is still the case in some AAA games, though the trend is thankfully changing in recent years.

You are not capturing even 1% of a person’s needs with a persona. 100 words, 5 favorite brands, and 3 character traits are not enough. You need a whole book for that. People are complex.

Designing for humans, not sheets

It is hard to understand someone’s expectations with a simple sheet. Why not skip it and simply remember that you are designing for people, not stereotyped profiles?

Today the world is extremely complex. Designing for rigid profiles cannot be a durable solution; designers have to understand that besides being “users,” people have emotional needs.

Charles Darwin said that humans have a universal way to communicate: through emotions.

Try to speak this language to your users. This is what unites us. Be honest in your design, and naturally, it will speak to everyone without the need for a persona.

Instead of considering your users as personas, consider your product as a persona. Try to personify it. Find how your product should communicate, and your users will naturally commit emotionally to it.