Are user personas outdated?
When Alan Cooper introduced personas in the 1990s, his goal was simple: help designers keep real human goals at the heart of every design decision.
He imagined personas as evolving tools — starting as educated guesses, then maturing through ongoing research into powerful, data-backed companions for the design process.
But somewhere between Cooper’s original vision and today’s product workflows, something went wrong.
In my own experience working in companies of different sizes and structures, I’ve rarely seen personas live up to their promise. Instead of being living, breathing decision-making tools, they are often produced for a kickoff workshop, celebrated for a moment, and then quietly filed away in a shared folder — never to be updated again.
Worse, they’re frequently padded with demographic fluff that looks good on a slide but does nothing to guide design. They’re disconnected from analytics, journey maps, and product decisions. They’re treated as deliverables to check off a list, not as tools to guide ongoing work.
And that’s a shame, because personas started as something far more meaningful.
The Original Idea Behind Personas
The idea of personas emerged from Cooper’s work on Goal-Directed Design. In the mid-80s and early 90s, he noticed that product teams often designed for “the user” as an abstract concept — which made it too easy to ignore real people’s needs. By creating fictional but research-based archetypes — with names, goals, motivations, and frustrations — Cooper gave teams a way to humanize their users and design with empathy.
These personas were never meant to be static. They were supposed to grow with every new piece of user insight, shifting as behaviors, contexts, and needs evolved. In their best form, they became the heartbeat of user-centered design.
What Personas Are Meant to Be
At their core, personas are fictional, yet realistic, portraits of your target users — built from real data, representing patterns of behavior, motivation, and context. They’re meant to answer one fundamental question: Who are we designing for?
In theory, they bring four key benefits:
Empathy — They help teams understand and care about the people behind the metrics.
Focus — They keep design anchored to user needs, preventing scope creep or “design by stakeholder.”
Alignment — They give cross-functional teams a shared language for talking about users.
Decision Support — They help prioritize features and guide trade-offs by asking, “Would this help our primary persona achieve their goal?”
When they work, personas are more than a document — they are a living guide that shapes the design process from start to finish.
How to Build Them — in Theory
Research from Nielsen Norman Group, Interaction Design Foundation, and Design Bridges points to similar best practices:
Base them on real evidence — Draw from interviews, usability testing, analytics, and surveys.
Focus on behaviors and motivations — Demographics alone rarely help make design decisions.
Keep them concise and memorable — A persona that no one remembers won’t influence anything.
Make them easy to update — They should live in a space where changes are quick and visible.
Integrate them into the workflow — If they’re not used in sprint planning, design reviews, and roadmap discussions, they won’t survive.
But this is where the gap between theory and practice opens up.
Why Personas Became So Criticized
Today, you’ll find countless articles declaring that “personas are dead” — from Jared Spool’s claim that they fail to capture real behavior, to Nielsen Norman Group’s caution that they often lack data, to Paul Boag’s call for personas that fit agile workflows. The criticism is not without merit.
The reasons are painfully familiar:
They’re static — Created once and never updated.
They’re assumption-driven — Starting as proto-personas is fine, but many never go through validation.
They’re fluffy — Overloaded with irrelevant demographic details and stock photos.
They’re isolated — Left out of analytics, journey maps, and product metrics.
They’re performative — Made to impress in a presentation, not to guide decisions.
When this happens, personas lose credibility. Teams stop trusting them, and once trust is gone, so is their usefulness.
The Trends That Changed the Game
Modern UX practice moves faster than ever. Agile and lean product cycles mean teams iterate weekly. Tools like Jobs-To-Be-Done, behavioral archetypes, and live analytics can deliver fresher, more actionable insights.
The trend reflected in the recent UX debate is clear:
Personas aren’t dead — but they can’t survive as static, one-off deliverables.
They need to be dynamic, data-driven, and embedded into the design process.
They must prove their value by connecting directly to measurable outcomes.
Without these changes, personas will keep ending up in the back of the drawer.
How to Save Personas from Dying
If we want personas to be more than pretty documents, we have to rebuild them with survival in mind. Drawing from Paul Boag’s agile-friendly approach, NN/g’s creation methods, Design Bridges’ data-first mindset, and Interaction Design Foundation’s behavioral focus, here’s how:
1. Start with Evidence, Not Assumptions
Don’t skip research. Build personas from interviews, analytics, and testing data — even if you start with proto-personas, validate them as soon as possible.
2. Focus on Behaviors and Goals
Strip away irrelevant demographics. Keep what helps you make design decisions: patterns of behavior, motivations, and frustrations.
3. Keep Them Alive
Revisit personas after new research, product updates, or market changes. Treat them like a living document, not a finished product.
4. Embed Them Into Every Decision
Make personas part of sprint planning, design briefs, and feature prioritization. If they’re not in the room, they can’t guide the conversation.
5. Connect Them to Measurable Outcomes
Tie persona needs to KPIs like conversion, retention, or task success. Track progress to show their real impact on the business.
From Forgotten Artifact to Daily Tool
When Alan Cooper introduced personas, he envisioned them as allies in the design process — not as relics of a kickoff meeting. The problem isn’t the idea; it’s how we’ve treated it.
If we build personas with evidence, focus them on behavior, keep them alive, embed them in the workflow, and connect them to measurable results, they can finally live up to their potential.
I’ve turned these five steps into a LinkedIn carousel you can swipe through — a quick, visual way to see exactly how to rescue your personas from an early death.
Because a persona that lives and breathes with your product isn’t just a document — it’s your design team’s most valuable ally.
