The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
- Muriel Rukeyser
Persona are the foundation of a successful product effort. But they are only successful when they are well published and well used. You'll know you're getting close to a well-implemented persona when even the back end engineers talk about Marcia, instead of the user.
The value of a persona as a representation of the user is well known. But, there is more. A well-socialized persona gives the entire team a purpose for their efforts. At the end of the day, there is more reward in delivering an excellent experience to Marcia, or Venkat, or Carlos, than there is in enhancing the experience of some faceless "user."
Well-communicated personas have high production value, which lends to their credibility and underscores their importance.
A common design implementation of persona artifacts reduces the effort it takes the consumer of the persona to understand key differences among the different persona.
Well-published personas demand different artifacts for different communication needs. Published personas come in a variety of forms, each intended for a particular type of communications. Large posters serve as visible reminders of relevant personas, but don't provide the level of detail you'd find in a full one-sheet. Persona cards are somewhere in the middle. And, card books catalog a series of personas relevant across product families.
"Anti-persona" can be a powerful tool for controlling scope creep and keeping the Product and Engineering teams focused on key product features. For one project targeted at the citizen developer (Randy), we created a highly skilled IT engineer (Venkat) as a foil to help teams understand when a proposed feature would be terrific for Venkat, but not usable by Randy.
Production values lend credibility, especially with new audiences. And a consistency of design helps create a sense of cohesion across the persona portfolio.
A good persona project demands cross-organizational guidance and buy-in from user research, content strategy, product management, marketing, design, customer success, and the executive team.
There are times when the optimal production value of the persona assets is quite rough. For example, the Diana persona from a Gallo mobile design project never made it past the sketch stage. This persona artifact was very fast to develop and iterate and enough to focus the client and design team, and the POC was delivered 72 hours later.
