Leave useless personas behind and create inclusive, meaningful, evidence-based personas to inform your content and design work.

Any good writer or designer knows that understanding the audience is key. Whether you’re a UX writer working on microcopy for a product, or a copywriter working on a website project, you can write better words when you know who they are for.

Sometimes, new and established businesses don’t know as much about their target audience as they should. More commonly, they only think they know their audience — but have never actually talked to or researched their audience in a meaningful way.

5 Types of Useless, Harmful Personas

Creating a user persona, also sometimes referred to as a customer avatar, is a great concept in theory. Personas are profiles of a fictional, individual person who represents your larger audience. They are like having a cheat-sheet that anyone can reference when creating content, designing a website or product experience, or even when making business decisions.

Unfortunately, the way many organizations create and use personas can become problematic or lack value. These 5 types of personas are the worst offenders.

1. Personas based on assumptions

This is the top offender. Many businesses and organizations create user personas based on zero actual evidence. They find a persona template online and fill it out with things like age, name, income, and basic pain points. They just imagine who their customer is and then make up information to fill in the blanks.

Without research, your persona is based on assumptions that could be completely wrong.

The problem with personas like this is that those assumptions could miss the mark entirely. You may think your customers care about one thing, when they care far more about another. Businesses with large user bases might even guess the median age of their consumers incorrectly.

2. Outdated or irrelevant personas

This one is self-explanatory and occurs when a business creates a persona that might actually be based on research, but then doesn’t update that persona as the business or audience changes over time.

Customer needs evolve, and so businesses. Technology changes, trends change, laws change, economies change, and customers themselves get older and enter different phases of their lives. The persona you created two years ago most likely isn’t relevant anymore.

3. Personas that are so generic, they mean nothing

I’ve seen some personas that were so minimal and generic they had zero value. They had clearly been an afterthought created by a marketer who had no time to devote to the task. I don’t want to call anyone out, but here’s a made-up persona that is structured exactly like some of the ones I’ve seen lately.

That persona could basically describe any father anywhere. It provides no new insights that would help guide a writer to create meaningful, useful content. It’s so generic and thoughtless that it may as well not exist.

4. Relying on personas alone

Personas could be well researched, updated, and full of meaningful information and still lead writers astray. This happens when personas are the only documentation writers are given. It sounds silly, but this happens a lot. Many businesses think that if they have personas and a website to link to, they don’t need to provide a writer with any other information.

But personas, when they’re the reference for customer needs and aren’t supplemented with richer contextual information, aren’t helpful.

5. Personas that don’t represent human diversity

The biggest potential problem with personas is that they can lead teams to create content or experiences that exclude people at best, and are harmful at worst. This happens when a design team relies on a persona as the One Source of Truth for all things a user needs.

When your north star as a design team is a just a persona, it’s easy to forget that your persona is supposed to represent a lot of people who are all individuals, with different backgrounds, experiences, and abilities. For example, if your only north star as a writer is an able-bodied and White, it can become all too easy to forget about the importance of accessibility or inclusive language.

To craft content and user experiences that are truly “user-centered,” you’ll need more than the generic user personas that are widely used today.

How to create useful, inclusive personas to inform your content

Start with your goals

Consider why you even want or need a persona in the first place. Maybe you’re interested in creating highly targeted content to make the most of your marketing time and money. Or, perhaps you’re interested in developing services or products that are more beneficial to your consumers and know that truly understanding their needs, and will guide how you plan, create, and prioritize content.

Gather some quantitative data

Start with collecting the most basic data on your audience such as their age, name, address, gender, income and marital status.

Refer back to your goals so you are certain to collect data that supports them. Likewise, don’t bother collecting metrics you don’t really need. If an age range is not going to impact the way you market your business, you don’t need this information.

Define a hypothesis and list your assumptions

Next, create a hypothesized user persona and examine the assumptions you’re making throughout that process.

What do your consumers do in their spare time and what values do they share? Are they attracted to name brands? Are they technically savvy? What keeps them up at night? What gets them out of bed in the morning? And so on. Fill in your questions with data and assumptions, and carefully consider areas where you might be wrong or need more information.

Once you’ve collected your data, use it to create a hypothetical persona. The numbers and your assumptions may give you a good starting place, but they may not tell a whole or accurate story about your persona.

Test your hypothesis with qualitative research

Understanding the complex interests, motivations and behaviors of humans is difficult to do from only looking at the numbers.

This is when it’s important to ask and listen. By conducting user interviews, ethnographic studies, surveys, or content usability tests, real users and customers will give a voice and perspective to your person.

Create a persona spectrum instead

Informed by your quantitative and qualitative research insights, you can start to build a persona spectrum. This spectrum approach from Microsoft Design ditches the static, fictional profile of traditional personas and replaces it with a persona document based on motivations and contextual needs.

“A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups. It shows how that motivation can change depending on context.” —Margaret P. and Doug Kim, Microsoft Design

Using a persona spectrum allows you to synthesize the common needs, motivations, and pain points of your audience — without reducing them into a singular character. With the spectrum, you can document what’s really important, but also consider the range of abilities and contexts that those deeper user needs exist in. Not only will this help you avoid the pitfall of an exclusionary, problematic persona, it’s just better overall. The spectrum approach gives writers and designers alike information that is richer, more meaningful, and more relevant to creative work.

Resources on persona spectrums:

The reward for doing it right

When you do the work to create a persona the right way — combining qualitative and quantitative research, using a persona spectrum, and consistently updating it over time — you’ll end up with an internal tool that truly helps you connect with and serve your users in more impactful ways.

You’ll feel more confident knowing your content is useful, usable, and valuable to the intended audience, and end up wasting less valuable time and resources into creating content that doesn't work.

Inclusive User Personas for Content Strategy and Writing