Personas | Hacker News Reader

Personas

about.gitlab.com

143 pointsmooreds33 comments

In a similar vein, GDS (govuk) published details of their accessibility personas a few years ago at https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2019/02/11/using-persona-p...

Oh that's cool, the ODS (Ontario Digital Service) also published their personas as a part of their user research guide: https://www.ontario.ca/page/personas

Slight bug: Eddie and Dana aren't linked in the ToC.

I've used these. I think it's a good idea, not to have pictures of the users. In my experience, we tended to use stock photos, and the pictures could bias the work.

Of course, now you have thispersondoesnotexist.com. I just used that, to populate a test DB with 10,000 fake personas.

Hey, GitLab team member here :)

Thanks for mentioning a possible bug! I looked over the page to check and get it fixed, but it looks like Eddie and Dana are listed in the Table of Contents, but under "Internal Personas" (assuming you meant they weren't listed in the User Personas list in the beginning): https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/personas/#internal...

I actually didn't know about https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/, that's kinda neat!

Gotcha. Thanks for the update.

I used that site to generate avatar images for “users” on my service.

It was only 10K users, which is a rounding error, for most “Big Data” types, these days, but I did send the author an email, explaining what I was doing. I didn’t expect a response, and didn’t get one, but it was only polite.

I saw in another comment that you use the avatar images for fake user accounts that are as realistic as possible - that's pretty cool.

Coming back to what you noticed about the personas page. Another GitLab team member (u/john_cogs) created a Merge Request[1] to update the page so that there's a "List of internal personas" to match the list at the top :)

Thanks for helping us improve the handbook!

[1]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...

> test DB with 10,000 fake personas.

Not personas in the common usage sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)

Personas are a psychological trick for humans. Generally quite effective. Like reading out loud they are to stop your brain not seeing what you don't want to see (ie bugs)

You are correct. Different type of “persona,” in my case. These were fake user accounts, crafted to be as “real” as possible.

However, we used to use “personas,” in the OP sense, in my previous job, when designing UX.

Like I said. Pictures were both good and bad. They helped to make the personas “real,” but they could also give us bias towards/against certain personas.

Personas is a business fad I'm skeptical about. They can often be little more than stereotypes, and they often make the "high dimensional orange" mistake.

You imagine your persona has various attributes, of course. Like political preference, religiousness, age, income, melanin level, love of dark chocolate, love of Grateful Dead, you name it. And a lot of these are probably strongly correlated.

But if you normalize these attributes according to how much they vary, say on a scale from -1 to 1, then the average person is 0 on everything. But that person is vanishingly unlikely. So is the person who "follows all the stereotypes" and is a straight 1. Most people will lie on a "shell" at a specific distance from 0. That's the high dimensional orange: most of its volume is in the rind.

Your users/customers will feel pigeonholed when you assume that just because you like Grateful Dead, you'll like Santana. Or that just because you voted for Trump, you must love Prager U. Or that just because you've got high melanin, you like basketball. You get the picture, it's very easy to start annoying people with your "persona" assumptions.

"Jobs to be done" are thought by some to be a better way of thinking about your product users than personas.

https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done https://www.springboard.com/blog/design/user-personas-vs-jtb...

What you've described is how Personas are used incorrectly.

Personas are a good way to have an overview of how people use a complex product. It's basically categories and metrics, but high level and coarse.

For example, for a streaming service you may have people who don't care about ads or audio and video quality because all they do is have something in the background while they cook, or drive the car. That's Persona A. And you have people who carefully curate their content, look for uncut gems, and have extensive music and film catalogs. That's Persona B.

And then you try to look at your product from both perspectives. And then you either try to reconcile the two, or select one of them to cater to (backed up, by stats and data).

However I agree that in many cases it's just a business fad

Could you apply your criticism to Gitlab personas in the link above? I am not sure I am following how politics, religiousness, age, melanin level, love of chocolate, etc. etc. could be relevant in that example.

The “Sasha” engineer persona’s frustrations part:

> I’m frustrated when requirements change after work has already begun on a project.

> I’m frustrated when work is inaccurately scoped, because it causes stress and eats into time planned for other work.

> I’m frustrated when I come across brittle code and something that should be an easy fix requires a lot of rework.

> I’m concerned that by taking longer than expected on a task I may be judged or seen as blocking others’ work.

This feels like a very rigid and grumpy personality, pretty unidimensional with the the “serious business” knob turned to 11.

That is I think the ‘"follows all the stereotypes" and is a straight 1.’ phenomenon parent is referring to.

Personas come from the sales and marketing world. They're not as damaging in development when they're little more than user stories with a name - but neither then are they very useful.

What is the "high dimensional orange" mistake

Persona definitions are super helpful training for new hire onboarding. Nothing beats F2F time with a customer, but it’s a great start to learn who you’re building for or selling to.

Why does this seem so dystopian? I’m trying to figure out why this rubs me wrong. It seems practical, and have well defined roles as guides seems to make sense. But some part of this feels like it just replaced the human aspect. Like it just replaced the team with the roles, and like it just demolished the idea that a generalist could exist.

I could never imagine a company getting off the ground with this kind of system.

I think you're reading too much into it. Gitlab's "personas" just seem like a slightly cutesier version of the bog-standard "user story" technique[1]. They've also been around for about 30 years (from a search, I wasn't aware of this before)[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)

You can also combine them to then have stories like

As <persona> I can <capability>, so that <receive benefit>

Which improves the story a bit imho because you have a clearer picture on what "role" does or can also divide them up (according to familiarity/usage frequency of the tool e.g.)

In product design, Personas are a way to agree on jobs to be done, scope the work and help find new ideas for features.

In Marketing it helps to brief agencies and to talk about a big group of people in a less homogeneous way.

One person can be in multiple persona categories, and personas can change or evolve over time.

I don’t see the “dystopian” aspect in it, nor do Insee it demolish any idea.

It’s just a tool.

> I could never imagine a company getting off the ground with this kind of system.

Well, many companies do this.

This is a common tool for aligning around user needs.

Personas are a popular tool in "design thinking" and are useful for helping product owners, designers, and developers consider the needs of a "known" set of user archetypes. The point is to see your app through their eyes, priorities, frustrations. Certainly there are users who don't fit any particular persona, but for the happy paths of your app, it's helpful to give a name to a few known "classes" of user.

This isn't an original thing. The concept of personas is a common approach to doing UX testing and design. I learned about them in my university human-computer interaction course.

Random article from Google for example: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-per...

These are product marketing personas describing general roles that exist in companies that they want to sell to. They aren't personas for who should be GitLab employees, they're a design and sales tool.

These are buyer and user persona, not the actual role of the people working at GitLab. Personas are a regular tool used in product development or sales, where you create an idealized profile of the person and then use it to model behaviors.

It's exactly because humans contain multitudes that teams use personas. You can't design your ridesharing app around the needs of Marco, the policy coordinator in Washington, DC who loves longboarding and doesn't own a car, who needs a way to occasionally get to his aunt's house in Frederick, MD and also to get home after a wild EDM show - that's way too specific. What if Marco only wants to ride in American-made cars? Other people who need transport might not care about that.

Instead, you can design your app around "person who lives in the city, doesn't own a car, and needs transport for trips outside the city ~3x/month," and "bar/concert patron who needs transport for trips within the city ~5x/mo and may be intoxicated when trying to purchase that transport."

A "persona" is a shared part of the human experience that your product interfaces with, and using that abstraction lets you create products that fit neatly into many people's lives.

First, this is standard practice in marketing, nothing special here.

Second, I find this quite the opposite what you are describing. Instead of just coming up with too generalistic terms, ideas, the marketing team tries to imagine a potential, REAL customers and trying to prepare ways to talk to them. I find this not only effective, but more polite with everyone's time.

> Why does this seem so dystopian? I’m trying to figure out why this rubs me wrong.

For me it is being reduced to "Sasha (Software Developer)", she does not seem quite like me and I dont like to be categorized like that..

I understand why this is useful to gitlab, but from the external point of view it seems strange to be talked about in this way. Its almost as seeing the internal discussion of how to target you with ads.

But at the end of the day pretty much standard practise and is nothing more than an elaborate answer to "who uses our products and why." So kudos to gitlab to being open about it.

I don’t understand why people are taking these so personally. The point of them is to be an example of someone. They are characters, in a story.

Because they are stereotypes. And we all have negative experiences being stereotyped, because inevitably very few people fit the stereotype on all points.

No, user personas have names because they represent an individual. Not all software developers are Sasha, but Sasha is Sasha.

Nobody fits stereotypes on all fronts. Nobody is perfectly average, but that's not the point of personas.

Don't worry no one will ever use it except sometimes and the one time you forgot to use it but it could have been useful and someone will point out how you forgot to use it and it could have been useful and you will beat yourself up about it realizing that you will never get a promotion now! Haha jk.

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