Zombie-personas are dangerous

While preparing a workshop on personas, I was reading about the danger of using them…! I found it very interesting that the exercice of creating a representation of a targeted user to support your designing decisions could be hazardous to a project.

Personas helps you to define your design models and refine them by giving you a reference of a typical user’s intentions, goals and impediments. So of course it can be misleading for a project if you do not take care of them, or if their conception is not well done. They then become zombie-personas, explains Tom Allison in a slide representation (the .mp3 file can be found in the episode of uxcafe.de on the subject).

I’m not into zombies myself, but I found it’s a nice way to emphasis the danger and explain the problems a project could encounter while using personas. I would like to summarize them here and maybe try to explain them a bit. I’ll also be adding some zombies I heard of myself and my thoughts about them.

While using personas on a project, here are some potential horrors (ou erreurs) you want to be prepared for:

Zombie persona
These personas are created but forgotten in a drawer; the project does not refer to them anymore. Or if it does, it’s without really looking at the persona itself and relying on what they think the persona is. It thrives in the dark and feed on human brain – taking up valuable meeting time…

Vampire persona
It is a persona used without telling the others (the vampire takes a hold of you). It can affect a whole department. The problem resides in the fact that decisions will be taken based on needs/use cases that the other personas are not aware of. As Tom Allison nicely putted, all Undead personas can only live in the dark – where there is no communication.

Mirror or Narcissus persona
Narcissus was a man to whom the world had no other meaning than his own reflection.
That said, we always tend to design for ourselves. But it can be dangerous to slip into a pattern where you forget the outside world for whom you’re designing. This persona usualy appear when there is none…

Frankenstein or Unicorn persona
These are made up of anything nor nothing concrete; ie. without user research. They are fantasies of what the project beleive their users should be like. This completely undermine the concept of personas as a useful exercice.

Troll persona
Worst possible user; probably who doesn’t know how to use a mouse…!
It is a persona that represent what the project hates most about its users. It is mostly a dumb way to design feature, for it will make your project work for an extreme portion of your potential users. And you should find empathy in your personas: it’s hard to like the Troll.

So these are the ones I thought of based on the presentation by Tom. And i’m pretty sure we can find others. Please comment if you think of any.

That said, I like this whole metaphor for it makes a lot of sense and it’s a funnyand practical way to remember the potential dangers of playing with creatures such as personas.