Personas Deconstructed: Taking Apart User Assumptions to Craft Better Insights

Personas are used as a common framework to synthesize user research and crate a starting for setting design requirements. They are intentional amalgamations of user attributes which can be useful, but also have limitations and, at their worst, lead to stereotypes and flawed correlations.

This talk is about analyzing the existing structure of user personas to know when they're useful and re-evaluating how the current components of personas implies assumptions with set behaviors, demographics, and goals. We'll analyze the typical user persona structure and look at case studies where we re-imagine the persona framework to better match several different project contexts. Lastly, we'll walk through principals to guide the audience in how they can apply these techniques to creating better personas as part of their research and design approach.