Sorry folks, but I'll have to post the middlebrow dismissal: personas can be dangerous. All those well-designed Microsoft products that nobody used? You can almost always reverse-engineer the personas they catered to.
If you are building for a specific customer, you run the risk of overfitting for that customer, but at least you know someone will pay for that.
Just like any development or UX tool, personas can be dangerous or super effective. It has nothing to do with the concept of personas, it's just how people choose to research and use them. The intent isn't to design for a specific customer, it's to give the UX and development teams a common user reference point to validate their assumptions against through user interviews and continued research, iterating on the personas.
Yeah, personas are a good tool for refining your product once you know your market, but a startup by definition is still exploring. You can run extensive interviews and create a great set of personas today, then pivot into a completely different market and throw away all this work next week. Or create profiles based on what people say (which is different from what people do), build your product, and realize nobody cares.
Creating personas on what people say is bad UX, and not a flaw in personas. Knowing what a user behavior based interview/persona is the job of whoever is in charge of the startups UX process.
I don't see how you can "know your market" without some sort of idea on who your user is, what their behaviors are, and have some sort of empathy with them.
Regarding pivoting and "throwing out" the work... each discipline of a team would do that. That's your UX designers job, just like a programmer would have to throw away code or a graphic artist would throw away design collateral for the new direction.
The "realize nobody cares" is exactly what good UX personas prevent. I guess if a startup doesn't know how to incorporate or conduct good UX you could run into those problems.
I guess I just don't agree with your premise. You're basically describing what happens when something goes wrong with your UX and personas - so of course your argument makes sense since you're highlighting a worst case scenario. But you're neglecting to acknowledge that every day, many startups effectively use and get tremendous value from personas and UX, and you can't do real UX without personas.
I guess I'm letting my engineering background show, but I think you have to nail down the problem before you start to refine the solution. You have certainly seen people put up with absolutely horrendous interfaces, because they got the job done.
Sometimes, you are entering an established market in which the UX is the problem, and in that case, focusing on that right out of the gate makes sense.
I can see what you're saying, and I don't want to belabor it to death. But as the UX guy, a persona is what nails down the problem before ever coming to a solution.
Maybe we're talking about different types of personas. The question I'd ask from the very beginning is "who are we building this for and what problem is it going to solve?" And adding a little definition to the "who" and what problem they have is the first step in building anything, and making sure you don't waste time.
In the end, from day 1, from the first utterance of what your startup is about, you're building something for a human. Without empathy, you can't build the right product. And you can't empathize without personas. It's not even really a question of user experience, or user interface, it's just about nailing down the human problem.
Sure. Remember those Pocket PCs? Those were for the power-user CTO of a Microsoft shop. He doesn't want toys like the Palm Treo, he wants full-featured, .Net-powered applications in his pocket.
specificity is important for attracting eyeballs but this article doesn't show you an affective way of doing it.
Check out Eben Pagan Summit videos or or Dane Maxwell interview on Mixergy. They have a detailed breakdown on how to attract leads, and target your market with success.
The article is a lead-in to an app that helps you create personas.
I personally believe in the effectiveness of personas, but they can take a lot of time to do right, which is why I think there is a market for this type of SaaS.
If you are building for a specific customer, you run the risk of overfitting for that customer, but at least you know someone will pay for that.