To me personas are a great way to quickly gain focus and communicate if you are working in or with a large organization. However, I find that all too often they are used as a crutch and can prevent the designers from getting out and spending time with the users and sometimes they can get in the way of taking risks and innovating. We may be creatures of habit but thankfully habits can change.

I think if they are used correctly personas are a great tool but not the only one. Thanks for a good discussion!

Note however that solving someone else’s problem can be tremendously satisfying too; in fact, passion can flare bright & hot when you know you can vastly improve improve someone’s life or their job through your work. Some of my favorite projects have involved understanding completely unfamiliar domains (e.g., protein research & radiology to name two) and producing designs that have a real consequence. That sort of work… well, it simply ROCKS!

Personas — or specifically the persona process — can really fire up that passion and provide a much-needed focus when you’re not designing for yourself. To the question of “Why create these fictional characters, why not just design for the real customers you’ve met in person?”, I suggest it’s a matter of focus. The hardest part about any strategy is deciding what you’re NOT going to do, and the process of building personas helps with those decisions. Essentially, personas are segmentation for designers: they remind us who we’re focusing on and who we’re not.

FYI here’s another example of a persona, from one of my past projects. The full story of how this work affected design & marketing appears in a chapter in User-Centered Design Stories.

Yes, there is no formula. All this talk of “Method X is right, Method Y is wrong!” has always bugged me, even though I myself have engaged in it sometimes. The real answer is to listen to design process success stories, going back fifty or even a hundred years, and to apply lessons learned to your own unique needs and processes.

(This, by the way, is why I think design/UX conferences should consist of nothing but case studies and why, also, I’ve asked recently for persona pundits to show us some real user personas. I’d rather see a real process in action than see a generalized — and inevitably idealized — “methodology” advocacy.)

I’m not surprised to read this comment from the author of “Sketching User Experiences”, a book that advocates a dogma-free, open-minded approach to the design process. You should add Bill’s book to your Abe’s order of “Designing for People”.

It is really worth tracking down a first edition (on abebooks.com, for example, because of the phenomenal design), but it is still in print.

There you will find a non-dogmatic, pragmatic use of approach described.

There is no formula. Each problem demands its own approach. That is why I dislike blind dogma. And for me, going back more that 5 years in the history of design and UX is a good place to start. Seeing the true roots of the concepts today is enlightening, to say the least.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story

As far as the axioms of designing for yourself, it depends. It seems people in UX are often not trained in Human Factors, or understand the psychology of tacit knowledge. You cannot do knowledge elicitation on yourself, and you cannot measure your own responses to interaction. If you are considering product design, it helps to have separation and empathic understanding. If you are a designer, you are NOT an expert in your user’s work practice, but you can become a kind of participant observer if you are a good researcher. I design for doctors sometimes – I’m not a doctor, but have learned a lot about their work practice and everyday drivers and constraints. So I advocate research-design cycles so that designers can learn over time.