Maybe they’re supposed to be individuals, but the problem is that unlike real individuals, you made them up. You can’t learn anything from them that you didn’t put into them yourself. Only a real person with lifelong experience of being themselves can give you insight into what that’s like.
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Look, if you take a group of 100 people who are into Warhammer 40k, chances are that at least 80% of them will have played StarCraft too. Collapsing that group into a single person and calling her Wendy helps some people reason about them. If you prefer to think of them a Venn diagrams and that helps you sleep at night, no crime in that.
But you’re not learning that from a persona, you’re learning it from talking to 100 real people. You can put that into a persona if you like, but it won’t give you any new knowledge.
It's very common for a new perspective on knowledge you already have to enable breakthroughs in deriving new knowledge from it. In particular, imagining a person rather than a statistical abstraction will tend to activate useful neural wetware that simulates other humans.
Agree 100%, but I don’t understand how that leads to personas. Just talk about real people instead and you can get all of these benefits.
Maybe if you can find the exact right real person who reflects the statistical reality you've already measured, and if you don't feel it's creepy to obsess over this one person in your target demographic, and you don't end up needing their consent to disseminate information about them. It's much easier and approximately as effective (more effective wouldn't surprise me) to make one up.
That is a bad practice with respect to customer privacy.
A persona is a heuristic model, that’s all. It seems you feel like it’s dehumanizing. Would it make you feel better if we called it “human behavior model 748263”? There is nothing inherently bad about saying “if you like video games, you likely own a gaming PC or a console”? What if you call that association “748263”? What if instead of that number you called it “Wendy”? Does any of this make any difference to you?
If you are designing for someone, you have to base your design decisions on what you have observed that person doing or saying. By your logic, generalizing from past observations of other people is never going to be enough to make an adequate design.
So either you have to literally prototype each touchpoint (for example) with every possible customer (even the ones who can't articulate what they actually need), or the design is going to have to be based on insight into human nature and (varying) capabilities. Luckily, most designed things are simple enough that generalizing about users in order to discover the "right answer" isn't an unachievable fantasy.
This is not necessarily the case and makes light of an entire field.
Often times personas are developed by ethnographers, human centered designers, design researchers and are based upon actual users or prospective users.
Furthermore, data analytics can be used to generate personas. Personas can be representative of key forks in behavior patterns or beliefs and are a useful tool when making design and product decisions.
As written your comment seems to write off all of this based upon your claim that "only a real person" can give you insight. While the reality is that personas are based upon user insights and are often distillations thereof.
I’m aware that personas are often based upon insights from real people, but I question the value of repackaging the insights as a new, made up person. It introduces distractions and invites stereotypes. Just use real quotes and observations, statistics if it makes sense, and focus on describing typical or recurring situations or behaviors that are relevant to what you’re using the research for. A hair color or favorite snack isn’t going to be helpful.
"Just use real quotes and observations"
Again, it seems you have a strong baseless bias against user centered design practices. You argue against a strawman of your creation.
"A hair color or favorite snack isn’t going to be helpful."
It's about humanizing the product design process, don't pay any mind to extraneous information like hair color etc. At the end of the day, personas should be representative of the people you are developing products for and that's inherently valuable to the product development process and all the people involved who don't have a chance to be in front of users and get a feel for their needs, which determine how successful your product will be when they are aligned with what you are coding.
What about a disability, though?
Right. It's using demographics to predict product adoption, service sign up, etc. This is finding the best-fit stereotypes.
> You can’t learn anything from them that you didn’t put into them yourself.
Right. Personas should be backed up by research into real customers and potential customers. "Garbage in = garbage out."