My first interactions column, Persona Non Grata, has just been published. In the article, I consider some of the fatal problems with personas and how they can hurt while pretending to help.

Get a PDF of the article here. As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

See what else we’ve written about personas.

Other articles

• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here

Tags: article, column, customer, design, empathy, identity, interactions, lie, persona, research, understanding, writing

21 Responses to “Get our latest article, Persona Non Grata”

their blogto see how. A really good article on Personas… It is well written, entertaining and to the point; i.e. Personas are misused in most cases and a tool meant to “help companies actually get closer to their REAL customers

Pingback by PsychObserver 01.16.08 @ 6:13 am




a user story rundown, then perhaps the design and development team will relate more readily with these deliverables. Both have their own merits but by having the two together you have a holistic profile of your user group. BothSteve Portigaland Peter Merholz’s sides of the persona argument have valid points. Of course personas can be bad, but a really good one is worth so much in terms of getting the product right. User stories are cheap and very effective. Having keyword research and

Pingback by User Pathways 02.23.08 @ 1:08 pm




lame. Really, there’s no good excuse. Recently, in the design world there’s been a discussion regarding a research technique, the persona, and how they’re used and misused. For background read these:Persona Non Grata, Personas 99% Bad? and Personas are NOT a Document. Couldn’t come at a better time for me. As I sit here fretting about research, along comes Dave Robertson with all the answers. His article, “

Pingback by Play with the Machine 01.25.08 @ 5:47 am




ever need an ethnographic consultant to provide valuable findings from your customers that lead to innovation, his firm will hit a home run every time. This and his previous articles written for the ACM are available online. Here are links to them:Persona Non GrataEverybody’s Talkin’ At Me The Journey Is The Reward Hold Your Horses Living In The Overlap Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff Here is a link to his blog, All This Chittah Chattah: http://www.portigal.com/blog/

Pingback by User Experience Arts 01.07.09 @ 12:13 am




a few months back in a meditation on this issue, even futurists create pictures of a future that has “Changed Your Life Forever.” Personas, essentially the personal form of a scenario when used in a futuring context, frequently suffer fromovercooking. Whether created by bright and well-meaning designers or strategists or an ad-pitch team looking to convince a client, they often depict lives of the perfect user/consumer, whose average day is an unending sequence of early adopter behaviors or optimal

Pingback by Changeism - 07.22.08 @ 4:13 pm





Hey Steve,

Thanks for sending the column.

Interesting and easy read that (to me) is very good at conveying a clear message, which is to put a HUGE warning sign next to the use of personas.

Personas somehow remind me of CRM some time ago. Really good concept at the beginning taken over by profit hungry IT and marketing companies. Instead of working on the concept, they focused on tools to push more promotion to people; thus leading to an early death of the word CRM, and the need to come up with new terms like “Customer Experience”.

I would not necessary kill “personas” just yet though. because there is a need to record the profiles that come up from ethnographic research. Changing the name of the tool will not solve (but just shift) the problem. If personas are based on actual research and are used internally to feed in the design process (and not showed off on posters), then they can be pretty good, no? (am I being too naive here?)

Another example to support that: In Hong Kong many companies claim to have a user-centered development process and do usability, but when you ask if they involve users… well, almost none do… still usability is a good term and hopefully with more education, more and more users will be involved in the future.

Anyway, thanks for the article! Looking forward to future columns!

Comment by Nicolas 01.15.08 @ 8:20 pm





I think there are many examples of personas done well and having a good impact on the organization. But there are many horrifying counter-examples, and I’d like to step back and look at the affordances of the tool – if it’s that easy to misuse, is it really the best tool to be using?

Comment by Steve Portigal 01.16.08 @ 2:41 pm




To Be Or Not To Be: Personas in Design Research…

Amongst others I’ve also come across personas as a tool to ‘uncover’ possible dimensions of a set of archetypical attributes of (possible) customers.

Therefore with great interest I’m watching the current conversation between blog/web veteran…

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[...] Check out http://www.portigal.com/blog/ask-for-our-latest-article-persona-non-grata/ for info about the full interactions column, available by request. [...]

Pingback by Twan van Elk » Blog Archive » Persona’s ongeschikt middel? 01.20.08 @ 11:29 am




[...] Since the full article is not available for free on the interactions website, we’re offering it to anyone who is interested. Read more at http://www.portigal.com/blog/ask-for-our-latest-article-persona-non-grata/ [...]

Pingback by Страх и ненависть по отношению к персонажам | Fresh: новости мира юЕабилити 01.22.08 @ 1:58 am




[...] If you’d like to read our white paper about personas, you can find out how on our site at http://www.portigal.com/blog/ask... [...]

Pingback by Personas or not Personas ? - SuperFiction, le blog ::: marketing interactif, experience utilisateur, conception multimedia 01.30.08 @ 3:34 pm




[...] Steve Portigal published a thought-provoking article about the failings of personas in ACM’s Interactions magazine earlier this month. His fundamental argument is that personas are more dangerous than useful because they “are misused to maintain a safe distance from the people we design for… manifesting contempt over understanding, and creating the façade of user centered-ness…”. If you want to read it, ask Steve to send you a copy – it’s a stimulating read. [...]

Pingback by What would we do if they banned personas? at Experience Matters 01.31.08 @ 11:30 am




[...] http://www.portigal.com/blog/ask-for-our-latest-article-persona-non-grata/ [...]

Pingback by The Cranky Product Manager: Persona Non Grata 02.11.08 @ 12:45 pm




[...] In my recent column Persona Non Grata I point to some of the cultural problems inside organizations that personas can create, or mask. And what happens when your personas become your marketing? [...]

Pingback by All This ChittahChattah » Simulacrap 04.10.08 @ 12:28 pm




[...] There’s been a lot of interesting discussion recently around personas. Part of what’s really being talked about is how to tell an effective story. As in, one party has information they want to impart to another in a way that is impactful, memorable, makes a good working tool, and can be internalized and passed along to others. [...]

Pingback by All This ChittahChattah » Major McCheese 04.11.08 @ 9:41 pm




[...] Persona. A persona is an artificial identity derived from demographic analysis, survey results, focus group findings, and secret shopper interviews. It’s a convenient shorthand in the toolbox carried by user experience specialists – people like product designers, process architects and interior designers. [...]

Pingback by Canuckflack / She’s got persona - ality 05.08.08 @ 12:50 pm




[...] by:P. Alves | July 11, 2008 at 11:49 AM http://www.portigal.com/blog/ask-for-our-latest-article-persona-non-grata/ [...]

Pingback by The Cranky Product Manager: Persona Non Grata 07.24.08 @ 9:58 pm





Thanks for an interesting article… when involved in persona activities I always ground my imaginings with this quote from Philippe Starck:
“[At Thompson] I outlawed the word ‘consumer’ in all company meetings, and insisted it be replaced by the words ‘my friend,’ ‘my wife, ‘my daughter,’ ‘my mother,’ or ‘myself.’ It doesn’t sound the same at all, if you say: ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s shit, but the consumers will make do with it,’ or if you start over again and say, ‘It’s shit, but it doesn’t matter, my daughter will make do with it.’ All of a sudden, you can’t get away with it any more. There is an enormous task to be done with this kind of symbolic repositioning.”

Comment by Jim Rait 10.17.08 @ 5:16 am




[...] personas being used and misused during product development, we just seemed to have put too many “how not to” and “how to” for personas. There is a detailed book as well. Somewhere along time, we seem [...]

Pingback by Personas and archetypes | people inspired innovation 01.18.09 @ 11:19 pm




[...] was going to riff on Steve Portigal’s Persona Non Grata article, and how personae tend to be treated as cartoons of real people, obscuring actual behaviour [...]

Pingback by Ben Kraal: Ford use personas in design development, though could do it better 07.19.09 @ 11:09 pm




[...] http://www.portigal.com/blog/ask-for-our-latest-article-persona-non-grata/ [...]

Pingback by Persona Non Grata — The Cranky Product Manager 08.13.10 @ 3:48 pm