A persona that can't say no isn't doing any work

I've sat in a lot of rooms where a feature gets proposed and someone refers to a persona to stress test the idea. "Our user would love this", somebody says, and everyone tends to agree. They value their time, and the feature saves them time. What took me a while to notice is that the persona will often say yes to almost everything. You could argue for a power-user mode because the user wants more control. Next week you could argue for hiding that same mode because the user doesn't want too much clutter. Looking at it from multiple angles, a simplistic persona could favour both. A persona that agrees with everything can't help you choose between two things.

Everyone values simplicity

The reason usually lies in how the persona was written. Look at most simple personas and the traits are things like values simplicity, or wants to save time. All true but all useless, because they are true of most people. Nobody wants things slow or complicated. A trait that everyone shares can't tell two features apart. Hold it up against a proposal and it has nothing to push back with. You may get a yes by default. So in doing so, the persona works like a mirror. Whatever you were leaning towards, you can call it simpler or faster, and it has no visible pushback. You leave feeling as though the customer signed off a decision that you had already made.

What a real person refuses

A real person is not like that because a real person usually has edges. There are things they would never do, and things that would annoy them if you shipped them. None of it has much to do with whether the feature is simple. Think of the user who would rather keep the whole job in a spreadsheet than learn a tool built to replace it. A nicer onboarding is not going to move them. That refusal is worth more than any list of goals, because a refusal can stop a decision.

Refusals are harder to come by than goals, though. You can guess what someone wants from their job and their category, and mostly be right, because wanting things easier is a safe bet about anyone. What they won't do is specific to them. You may learn it by watching them, or by listening to people who have already left. That is more work than a room full of sticky notes tends to allow, which is probably why most personas skip it.

If you skip it, then you have removed the one part that could have argued back. Include what the customer rejects, and a proposal can run into it and ultimately fail. The persona has managed the one thing a mirror can't and that is that it can disagree with you. Understanding a customer was never about explaining, after the event, why they did what they did. Anyone can tell that story in retrospect... It is really about ruling things out in advance. A picture of the customer that bends to fit any decision you fancy is not really telling you about the customer.

The first time it stops you

So when I write a persona now, I care more about the refusals than the goals. I start with two questions. "What would this person never do?" And "what is already on the roadmap that they would push back on?". If nothing on your roadmap would make your persona wince, the persona is really just your plans with a customer's name on top. The moment it starts working is usually rather uncomfortable. It is the first time an honest read on the customer makes you drop an idea you liked, not because it was bad but because that person was never going to want it. That is a strange thing to be grateful for. It is also the only kind of persona I have found much use for, the sort that, now and then, tells you no.