Personas must be built from data, not invented
Aliases: data-based persona · fictional character sheet · proto-persona
What it is
A lunchtime sketch of “urban professional Aya,” stock photo and favorite brands included, is a character sheet, not a persona. A persona synthesizes recurring goals, constraints, and behavioral patterns into a namable role, and the synthesis must rest on material that can be pointed to in observation, interviews, logs, or support records. Imagination is allowed as a draft to be tested, but the draft must be labeled as hypothesis. Writing the draft as a user the team already knows forges a sample.
Why it happens
Minds fill blanks with stereotypes: job, clothes, catchphrases. Those details make the role “feel real” without adding anything about task failure. The more detail, the harder it is to object—arguing with a photographed person feels like denying someone who exists. Data does the opposite: each consequential sentence has to walk back to material, and unmatched sentences come out. Without that constraint, the persona retells the team’s existing product story in the voice of “users already confirmed this.”
Studying it
Build a source table for every persona claim: which session or log class supports it, which lines are scripted. Audit whether “quotes” exist in the raw record or are polished gold lines. Compare sourced personas with unsourced character sheets on how often they are challenged in later decisions—the latter are often never challenged, because there is nothing to challenge. Outcomes: share of sourced statements, count of unsourced flourishes, and whether the persona predicts a behavior that was not used to build it.
Where it stops holding
Early work may use a proto-persona with hypotheses written on its face, provided later data revises or kills it, and provided documents keep it in a separate column from evidential personas. Literary hooks (a name, a pet) may stay if they carry no inference, as memory aids only—not as demand arguments. Marketing buyer personas and interaction-research behavioral personas are not the same object; mixing them makes “we have data” ambiguous, because the data may be spend, not task behavior.
Applying it
- Attach a source page: each key goal, failure, and constraint opens to material; delete or flag as hypothesis any sentence that cannot.
- Do not let stock-photo vibe or brand taste count as evidence; if they appear, they must come from observation, not scripting.
- In review, hide photo and name, leave behavior and constraints, and see whether the team still knows who this is. If not, the sheet was packaging.
- Stamp proto-personas with an expiry; if data has not arrived, they do not enter the requirements record.