I’m a big fan of using personas to influence experience design – to a point.

Personas have become a religion for some folks, the most dominant and often the singular driver for making design choices.

My rub is not with personas themselves, my rub is with people that use personas as the only influence to drive their designs. Information architects and UE designers have become experts at deciding what content should get what share of voice based on who MAY be coming to your web site..

The fact is that technology has evolved quite a bit since the persona driven design methodologies were first introduced. Which means information architects don’t need to guess who is on your site. They know who is coming. Which changes the persona game.

To ignore the real customer needs in favor of their made up persona is silliness. It’s like ignoring what the GPS tells you because you paid so much for that compass.

Did I say silliness?