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Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

The criticism that opened my eyes to the issues with Personas was this example from Alan Klement:

> Why did Alan buy the Snickers candy bar?

A. Alan is a thirty-five year old; has a degree in marketing; likes peanuts, chocolate, nougat, and caramel; loves Snickers, eats one every day; has an active lifestyle; drives a Honda; aims to retire from age 55

B. Satisfy his hunger

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My other insight was that many UX firms treat artifacts like Personas as the deliverable. It is something concrete to show the value of the time and money spent doing research. But it is a deliverable that has almost no value to improving the product. The point of doing user research is to improve the product, not to produce a beautiful 20 page "research document". But translating user research from interview into fully-realized and delivered features is hard, and emailing a PDF of personas is comparably much easier.

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The other problem with Personas being the deliverable is often they're a form of making the marketing person's personal preferences look like user research. So instead of testing what thirtysomething professional males actually respond to, the campaign gets designed around imaginary Alan's enthusiasm for active lifestyles.

(In an extreme example of this, "Stefan" who was conceived by an internal marketing team to illustrate how a certain niche used a certain industry website ended up as an actual marionette with social media profiles with 2000 followers, blog articles about his holidays and photos taken with some very bemused industry executives who were also encouraged to download Foursquare so they could check in with him at tradeshows. An awful lot of paying customers' actual needs got ignored at the same time as the marketing team were having fun turning a persona they'd conceived into a mascot though)

I find this comment really funny because "satisfy your hunger" is the primary marketing message that Mars pushes for Snickers.

So in the course of questioning the value of a marketing concept (personae), Alan is inadvertently demonstrating that he has fully internalized the Snickers marketing.

Maybe this was intentional? If you have a link for greater context, I'd be interested to see it.

Yes, it is intentional. Apologies if unclear. This is an excerpt from his book: https://jtbd.info/1-challenges-and-hope-ddd7836df947

"Satisfy his hunger" does not explain why he went for Snickers and not a different candy bar or an apple.

I would say that about 20% of the time that I buy a Snicker bar is to "satisfy my hunger". I usually buy it as a treat for myself.

Do you buy a Snickers bar from a place that only sells Snickers bars?

If not, then the question of why you chose Snickers to satisfy your hunger--as opposed to all the other options available for about the same price--is of deep interest to just about any snack company.

The Snickers people have spent billions to help you answer that questions for at least 40 years. Snickers satisfies.

The very words chosen to ask the question speak to the effectiveness of that campaign.

I'm amazed that anyone would choose Snickers if they were hungry. It's just sugar -- eat a snickers bar and you'll be hungry again in 20 minutes. Is this not common knowledge?

I myself would only buy a Snickers if I was having a stressful day and needed something to make myself feel better.

> I'm amazed that anyone would choose Snickers if they were hungry. It's just sugar -

No, almost half it's calories are from fat.

he meant by weight its over 64% sugar. Fat is a third of calories —36%— not half.

The nutritional info I found online has, for a particular size, 215 Cal, and 11 g of fat. 11 g of fat is 99 Cal, which is 46%, not 36%.

I wondered same things. This stuff has calories, but won't make you feel much less hungry.

I also wondered about downvotes.

When people go wilderness backpacking, Snickers are a common go-to. They are calorie dense and provide the most relative to the weight.

Except when it's cold. One the early selling points for Clif Bars was that they would still be edible after a couple of hours snowshoeing. I'm not sure if that's still true for their current products.

Or when it's hot for that matter. Snickers bars melt. Clif bars do not.

I prefer frozen snickers to room temperature. I think a lot of overweight people share this preference because it helps us slow down and enjoy the dessert over a longer period.

I just like them colder - I love when halloween candy comes out, because I can get a bag of minis and throw them in the freezer.

Right? Cold weather is the best time to hike with Snickers!

if one were to read the motivating factors behind personas as described in “the inmates are running the asylum”, one would never come up with A. If one were to follow agile in principle (do; evaluate; improve what hurts; repeat), one would not end up with capital-A Agile Industry prescribing process by the book.

This sounds like the same reason people avoided C++: after seeing lots of unnecessary complex C++ just for the sake of being “object-oriented” but entirely missing the point, who’d think it’s possible to write clearer code in C++?

Yeah. I think one of the deep problems is that people don't know why they're doing something (or refuse to admit it to themselves).

A lot of the very early Agile adopters were there because they sincerely wanted to make better software. They were willing to be bold and do a lot of hard work. But after them came all the people who thought the wanted to make better software. The ones who wanted to feel bold and have the appearance of change without doing much work.

Those people were ripe for the sorts of consultants and books and certifications that promised the moon while letting them slap Agile decals on the dumb stuff they were already doing. And what they were already doing was a lot of top-down nonsense that helped powerful people feel powerful. "Yes, Mr. Executive! This will deliver the exact thing you wanted! And it will be precisely on time, for whatever you mean by 'on time'! And have no defects!"

It was nonsense, of course. But it let people pretend to be doing what they wanted to think of themselves doing, while also letting them actually do what they really wanted to do.

Maybe it's because people aren't being introduced to personas in the proper context, with examples of proper usage? Personally, I've seen the concept in some software books and articles, but didn't really make use of it because my impression was that they want you to produce answers like the example A here, and then to magically divine some insights out of them.

> My other insight was that many UX firms treat artifacts like Personas as the deliverable.

This matches my (limited, anecdotal) experience. They can be used to demonstrate that a set of UX choices will result in a set of results, but don't by themselves say if those results are better than alternatives unless the alternatives are also run through the same test. Essentially they act as benchmarks. Benchmarks are not a good deliverable and have little value if you benchmark only a single option.

Personas give you a context for what A would do when B. It's that decision by A that's valuable for the business.

I thought it was broadly understood that personas were just for slide decks.

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