UXPA Boston Conference 2021

The creation and use of personas can be a hotly debated topic among UX practitioners. Many of us have experienced the pain of crafting detailed biographies of current or target customers that represent people that we have no evidence actually exist in the world. In an effort to achieve empathy, focus is given to attributes that don’t really matter to our design work. Project teams then get attached to these figments of our collective imaginations and craft solutions for people that have no basis in reality. And this attachment makes it challenging to update the personas when we get actual data in the course of our work.
 
In an effort to combat creating fictional representations of customers, the speakers advocate for incorporating quantitative research into persona development with a focus on uncovering behaviors that will matter to the design and are likely to correlate in populations. We can leave the demographics that probably don’t matter for UX behind and still create empathy, differentiation and the team short-hand for user goals that personas provide so well. 
 
In this session, we will discuss a case study where this methodology was used, our results and what we’d do differently in the future.