Bad personas can make your skin crawl. The ones that offer no real insight into an audience and play make-believe with random facts are not useful in any context. Good personas theoretically inspire and guide innovation, but like any good story, it’s difficult to create relatable characters. This session outlines a project where we developed five nameless personas for lynda.com.Our method uses no names, psychology, or broad habits. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt explained, "it is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction." We removed the things that didn’t matter even if they were true from our personas. We communicated the major distinctions across the personas so lynda.com could immediately understand the lifetime value of their site to customers. In this session, we go over how we identified and eliminated the B.S. that creeps into personas, and how we made a video instead of the traditional paper approach.
