Replacing Personas with Characters

Because personas focus on creating a story made up of a customer’s attributes, instead of a story that explains a purchase, personas leave the brain in a unsatisfied state, argues Alan Klement. To fix this, in just a split second, the brain decides to make up it’s own story.

Personas, he says, have destructive effects on an organization. As each team member reads a persona, they will subconsciously fill it with their own assumptions which differ from everyone else.

The way to mitigate these unintended effects is to replace Personas with models that enable cohesive stories. These models are called Characters.