Three small steps to ensure that your personas are kept up to date
How to use user research to keep an accurate picture of your users
"So how will our user research inform our Personas?" A Lead Product Designer asked, which was a question that I hadn't expected.
It was true: the last time our personas had been looked at was pre-pandemic.
They desperately needed a refresh, but between the dozens of tasks I was juggling and the current company environment, gathering all the necessary people and formally updating it seemed impossible.
However, updating your personas shouldn't be a monumental effort; it doesn't always require as much effort as you might think. Instead, all it requires is a way to integrate it into your existing processes around research.
Personas aren't art pieces: update them (internally) with research
Personas, fictional and realistic descriptions of target users, always seem difficult to update for one key reason: you often need sign-off from a whole bunch of your team to make changes.
Multiple teams likely assembled and signed off on the current personas, and you might have even had several meetings around it. Making changes around what you’ve created is probably not that easy. After all, it's not very useful to have a constantly changing persona if you're going to use it for reference.
However, keeping it on a pedestal (or a dusty broom closet) and not touching it at all can lead to problems. It's one of the critical reasons Why personas fail.
After all, how often do you revisit over a year-old documents in your design process? Most likely, only a few times. So, how effective is it if it's out of sight and out of mind for most of the team?
This is where a concept called Versioning comes into play. It's a skill I've learned working with Engineering, which can help you with this.
While you might not immediately touch the existing persona, you can create another version, strictly for internal use, that you can keep up to date.
Capture user insights from research with internal user personas
When you talk with users, you learn more about them and their workflow. That's the basis of user research and testing, yet we often don't consider updating our personas to match what we learn.
That's what the Lead Product Designer asked me as I gave an overview of the templates and research workflow I was building. He was right, of course: I learned critical insights in the last session that I was desperate to preserve in some manner.
For example, one of the pre-testing questions I had asked yielded a fundamental user insight: users tended to shop around (and find our product) for one of three reasons: Scalability, Pricing models, or contracts expiring.
Yet this fundamental insight lived in a PowerPoint, not somewhere more visible. This is why I created an Internal User Persona: this was a way to keep a persona updated internally and eventually showcase this to our stakeholders.
This also helped to address a fundamental question around personas: if you were meeting with stakeholders to update your personas, what would you change and why?
That question often takes a ton of time to unpack, and by capturing some of the relevant user insights in an updated persona, I could eventually compile a more realistic version of my users.
This is what an internal User Persona offers. It's a live design artifact that can be updated easily, capturing user insights and giving a clearer picture of your users while avoiding stakeholder management.
You may think that your target user isn't going to change that much between versions. Sometimes, that may be true, but before you dismiss this, here are a few questions you should ask to see if your internal Personas need updating.
Personas likely need to be updated in these three sections
Some parts of personas are likely to stay the same, such as Technology level or Internet expertise. But that doesn't mean that all personas will always stay the same.
The most common changes to your persona tend to fall into three different categories:
1. Changes to the user background or context
2. Changes to specific technology needs or pain points
3. Changes due to competitors or a shifting market.
Here's how each of these work.
Changes to the user's background
The first draft of a user persona feels fictional to me. It's too convenient and idealistic at times. For example, a persona might mention Julie, a dog owner in Brooklyn, searching for apps that help her find dog walkers while at work.
While personas may be fictional users, that doesn't mean they can't have more realistic backgrounds and scenarios. In the case above, for example, you might find from user testing questions that users weren't searching for dog walking apps when they found your product: in fact, what users search Google Play or other app stores in their spare time?
Instead, as you find out, they were complaining to a friend about trying to search for dog walkers and got recommended someone. To pay and schedule that person, though, they need to use your app (as the Dog walker is associated with it). Providing that updated background based on real users ensures you're providing realistic user scenarios.
But that's not all.
Updated Technology needs and frustrations
Technology advancement, along with evolving user needs, may make it so that previous frustrations become irrelevant. What might have been a significant frustration nine months ago may no longer exist today.
One of the most common examples of this is often around different formats: for example, it might be that users used to tear their hair out because they couldn't upload .CSVs, only .PDFs. Or, they'd take screenshots of information to type it in because copying and pasting ruined their formatting.
Similarly, new, critical pain points might have emerged from user interviews, where users needed to realize your product could solve one of their most pressing issues.
Listen to see if the workflow has likely changed and if some of the frustrations or pain points (or tasks) have changed.
Market and Competitor Influence:
Even if your product and your users stay the same, the market, competitors, or outside forces may cause you to adjust your personas accordingly.
One of the most common examples of this is user mental models. For example, one year ago, most users didn't know what Generative AI was or how it might have affected specific jobs or markets. As a result, one of the things that you thought might appeal to users, which was a description of how some content was AI-generated, now has a lot more impact than you might have realized.
While these are not all the aspects of a persona that may change, these can offer a good starting place for updating your personas (internally).
Designing around outdated personas is often a recipe for failure
Imagine if the marketing team, with their marketing personas, was trying to create content and engagement around an outdated view of their customers. How likely would it be that they would fail? Pretty likely.
Yet, user personas live in this grey area where people think it's a one-time deal. Worse yet, it may not be touched for so long that it either becomes an art piece (or is just forgotten).
Part of this concerns stakeholder management: if you need tons of people to sign off on an update, it becomes easy to leave it for later. However, you can still update your internal personas based on user research to align with users more closely.
You often hear critical insights that deserve as much visibility as you can, as they help turn a theoretical user into a more realistic one. This is why user personas are essential.
But without a mechanism or workflow to ensure that you revisit these personas, you may be swamped with a dozen other things and forget about them.
But, personas are often a critical reference that your team will share when you want to summarize your users. It's also a reference that people use when designing and understanding the workflow. So, updating them, even if not externally, is essential to ensure you have the most accurate and up-to-date picture of your users.
If your personas are getting a little long in the tooth, try this method to update them and make sense of them. Doing so can yield many insights and visibility into who your user is today instead of several years ago.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.