How do we make personas better at Dinghy w/Nosipho Nwigbo

Welcome to the blog! This post is a summary of the YouTube video shown in the header, where Nils Borgböhmer and Nosipho Nwigbo from Dinghy discuss the common pitfalls of personas and how Dinghy redefines the process to create more accurate and dynamic personas. We'll dive into the challenges with traditional personas and offer insight into how Dinghy solves these issues.

tl;dr Link to this headline

Personas often fail due to their static nature, inventiveness, and outdated information. At Dinghy, we continuously update personas based on research, ensuring they evolve with the target audience. This dynamic approach helps create products that truly meet user needs, making the persona creation process more meaningful.

In this podcast episode, we took a deep dive into the subject of personas. Personas are vital tools that can help businesses and designers better understand their target audience, but often, they are created poorly. Many companies struggle with personas because they’re treated as one-time exercises, not evolving or updated to reflect the target audience’s changing needs. That’s where Dinghy comes in, with a method that addresses the four main issues of traditional personas.

At Dinghy, we believe that personas are useful, but only when they are dynamic, continuously updated, and grounded in research. In this post, Nosipho walks us through the Dinghy approach to making personas more practical and insightful.

Why Personas Often Fall Short Link to this headline

As Nosipho explains, traditional personas are often:

1. Too Static: They quickly become outdated as the business and market change.
2. Inventive: Many personas are filled with assumptions rather than data-backed insights.
3. Time-consuming: They take a lot of time to build and are rarely revisited.
4. Isolated: Many are created in a silo, without considering input from other departments or actual user research.

The Dinghy Approach: Continuous Evolution Link to this headline

At Dinghy, we tackle these issues head-on. Nosipho described our process in detail, starting with stakeholder interviews. These conversations are essential to gathering assumptions, insights, and any available data from within the business. From there, we move to secondary research to gather broader industry insights.

The next step is to create a hypothesis of who the target audience might be, always keeping in mind that this is not a rigid definition. Once this hypothesis is formed, we conduct primary research like interviews and user testing to validate or adjust our persona assumptions.

This continuous feedback loop means that our personas evolve alongside the business, ensuring they always reflect the most accurate, up-to-date version of our audience.

Why Are Personas Important? Link to this headline

While personas can sometimes feel like extra paperwork, they’re crucial to aligning a business around its true audience. Personas help us step outside our own perspectives and focus on the needs of the user. As Nosipho mentioned, it’s about empathizing with our users—understanding their behaviors, attitudes, and desires—so that we can design products that truly meet their needs.

Personas also serve as guidelines for everyone involved in product development, from marketers to designers to business strategists. They ensure that everyone is on the same page about who they’re designing for and what problems they’re solving. By continuously evolving these personas, we ensure that our teams always work towards the same, user-centered goals.

The Future of Personas Link to this headline

As Nils pointed out, one of the most exciting aspects of using personas is how they can streamline the entire product development process. By providing a constant point of reference (a “North Star”), teams can move faster and more efficiently, always asking: Is this for our target audience?