Most personas are a waste of time

Every designer has a story like this one. Your team has spent weeks creating a persona deck. Names, stock photos, favourite coffee orders and a quote pinned at the bottom that reads like a cheesy greeting card. It gets presented once, everyone’s relieved it’s done and then it disappears into a SharePoint folder, never to see the light of day again.

It’s tragic really because when they’re done well personas are genuinely useful. They’re a fantastic tool for building understanding and give a team something concrete to test ideas against. They bridge the gap between research and design. The problem is almost always how we frame them.

Personas are not a final product

The biggest mistake I see is organisations treating a persona as a deliverable, something you produce to prove the research happened. But they’re not meant to be a deliverable, they’re supposed to be a tool for making decisions, a means to an end. If they’re not showing up in ideation or prototype testing they aren't doing their job.

So instead of starting with "What should our personas look like?" It's worth starting with "What customer behaviours do we need to consider when making design choices?" That one shift in framing changes almost everything downstream. What you prioritise, what you include and what you leave out.

Context tells you why

People don't make decisions in isolation. We're shaped by family, community, culture, work, and a hundred small social expectations we barely notice. So it's strange how often personas flatten all of that into a checklist. We include details like: shops online, uses social media, cares about sustainability, time-poor. None of that is wrong, it's just not very useful on its own, because it tells you what someone does without ever getting at why.

Take two people furnishing their first home. Both in their early twenties, both renting, both on a tight budget. On paper they’re identical. But one just left home for university and the other moved cities for a work apprenticeship. Their support networks are different. Their financial pressures are different. What they're optimising for is different. Age put them in the same bucket but their context is what actually explains their choices and that’s what we as designers must consider. A persona shouldn’t be demographic checkbox.

Arbitrary information leads to biases

The hardest part of building a persona usually isn't deciding what to include, it's having the discipline to leave things out. Every detail you add signals importance, whether you mean it to or not. Mention someone's age, gender, ethnicity or occupation, and people will quietly assume it explains their behaviour. Sometimes it does. Often it's just noise dressed up as insight. And in the worst cases it’s an unchecked cliché.

If a characteristic doesn't change the design decision in front of you, cut it. But if you do include it, say why it matters. If a persona states someone's ethnicity or gender without explaining its relevance, you're not giving the team information; you're handing them a blank space to fill in with their own assumptions. And those assumptions are exactly how personas end up reinforcing stereotypes instead of preventing them.

A leaner persona reduces bias rather than baking it in.

They're not for your customers

One habit worth breaking is showing personas to the customers they're based on. Some businesses like doing this, usually to demonstrate how well they "get" their audience. I’ve seen them published on websites and handed out at co-design workshops.

But your customers already know themselves, they're not going to find much value in a summary of who they are. And I’d argue in some cases they probably won’t like being pidgeon-holed. What they actually care about is the thing your persona was supposed to produce: a design that works for them.

If a persona never leaves the building, that's fine. Its job was always internal.

Personas should call out differences

There's a failure mode that's easy to miss because it only shows up once you have more than one persona in the room. You end up with, say, four of them, and on paper they're distinct. Different names, different photos, different quotes. But look closer and they're all saying some version of the same thing. One cares about things being "ethically sourced," another is motivated to live "ethically". Different words, same idea, no real contrast between them.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. If your personas overlap this much, two things tend to happen. People using them can't see themselves as clearly fitting any single one; they feel like a bit of all four, which makes the whole set less useful for understanding their customers. And designers lose the ability to test an idea against genuinely different needs, because the "different" personas would all react to it the same way anyway.

Good personas are personas that call out customers' different motivations and behaviours. If two of them could be merged without losing anything, they're one persona, not two.

Build them from real people

A persona is a synthesis of research, not a creative writing exercise. That means actual time with real customers. Watching how they behave and noticing what’s important to them.

The payoff is twofold. Designers connect far more easily with a person who feels real than one who was clearly invented in a workshop. And personas grounded in real behaviour hold up better as a foundation for generating and testing ideas, because they're describing an actual problem rather than a plausible-sounding one.

A quick test for whether yours is any good

Here's a simple gut check: hand the persona to two designers and ask them, separately, what problem they think they're solving. Not what they'd design, their solutions can and should differ, that's the point of having designers. What matters is whether they'd describe the problem that needs to be solved the same way.

A good persona makes the problem unambiguous, even if it leaves plenty of room for different answers to it. If two designers walk away with two different ideas of what they're actually fixing, the persona hasn't done its job, no matter how good either of their designs turn out to be.

The best personas aren’t remembered for the illustration style or the layout. They're remembered because people kept reaching for them, because they helped a team challenge an assumption, understand a bit more context, or make a call they were otherwise stuck on. That's all a persona needs to do.