Should UX practitioners discard personas completely and use other frameworks such as job to be done or archetypes instead? It feels like this question has been floating around for a while but this might just be the wrong question to ask.
I personally don’t agree with any definitive rejection (or acceptance) of any UX tools or methods. To me, it’s not about which one is the best, but about which one is better at solving the problem we have at hand or more appropriate considering the organisation’s CX maturity level, who is gonna be using it and how, and many other contextual factors.
In this talk, I will cover a brief history of personas, job to be done, and archetypes, their evolution over time and the pros and cons I see in each of these tools/frameworks. Then, I will share my experiences using each of them, in different contexts, projects and companies, and the outcomes we got. I will also like to share how I ‘hacked’ the standard persona for a project to make it fit for purpose and created a dynamic persona library for a large government organisation.
Hopefully my experiences can spark a debate around why it might not be a good idea to categorically reject or accept a single tool as a silver bullet or the best for every situation.
