Most User Personas Suck. Here’s How to Fix Them

Do the research, otherwise your personas are just caricatures of your actual users.

User personas are supposed to make teams more customer-centric. Instead, most of them gather digital dust, buried on your company’s cloud server, and forgotten by everyone but the poor designer who made them.

Anyone who’s worked with me knows: I’ve never been the biggest fan of creating personas. Not because personas are a bad idea per se, but because the way most teams create and apply them is broken.

So what’s wrong with most personas, and how can teams fix them?

1. They’re often fictional instead of factual.

As someone recently commented in the UX Design subreddit:

“Personas tend to be just some made-up bullshit.”

Too many personas—the bad ones—are exactly that. They begin with a blank Figma file and a few guesses: "Let’s call her 'Busy Brenda' — she’s a mom, she shops online, and she hates waiting..."

If you're inventing details just to fill out the blanks on a persona template, congratulations, you’ve created a caricature, not a customer insight. Sadly, this happens far too often, which is why most personas are utterly useless.

How to fix it: Get out of the building. Talk to your target audience. Ground your personas in observations from your actual primary and secondary user research like interviews, surveys, and behavioral data. If you’re just making things up based on perceived assumptions, don’t bother creating personas at all.

2. Your personas are static snapshots of a moving target.

Markets change. Customer needs and expectations evolve. Especially in the rapidly changing world of software and technology.

But that beautiful persona deck you made last year… or two years ago? Still exactly the same.

Personas that don’t evolve with new research aren’t just useless — they’re dangerous. They spread outdated assumptions that can quietly derail decision-making.

How to fix it: Treat personas like living documents. Update them regularly with fresh insights, and archive the information that is no longer accurate.

3. They’re crammed with irrelevant filler.

Here comes my personal pet peeve. You’ve seen personas like these before:

"Favorite ice cream flavor: butter pecan."

“Graduated from State with a BA in Marketing.”

"Owns a mini goldendoodle named Rufus."

99.9% of the time (unless you’re building a community for dog owners), no one cares. And worse: this kind of filler distracts from what actually matters.

A good persona focuses on actionable, decision-driving information:

• What problems are they encountering?

• What frustrates them?

• What excites them?

• What motivates their behavior?

• What’s the context in which they’re trying to accomplish a task?

• What barriers stand in their way?

How to fix it: Trim the fat. Focus on actionable information. Prioritize insights that influence product, marketing, sales, and support decisions.

4. Personas are disconnected from the day-to-day decision-making.

Too often, personas often get sidelined, even when they’re based on real research. Why? Because they don’t feel usable. They’re just another slide deck lost on Sharepoint or Confluence.

How to fix it: Make your personas operational. Tie them directly to the ceremonies of your delivery process.

• Print them out, and make them visible.

• Refer to them during sprint planning.

• Use them when crafting messaging.

• Revisit them during roadmap prioritization.

Another way to operationalize research data is through a new startup called Rooost. Rooost allows any team member to chat with an AI-powered version of their personas — trained directly on their team’s real research data. Even better: Rooost personas evolve as teams continue to collect and feed them additional insights.

Personas aren’t the problem. 

Fabricated, irrelevant, and outdated personas are the problem. Teams that recreate their personas based on a foundation of real research, continuous updates, and operational integration can make personas that live up to their potential — as a bridge between what customers truly need and what teams build.

If you’re ready to stop guessing and start connecting, it’s time to rethink how you create, manage, and use your personas. Maybe even rethink what a "persona" can be.