On fake personas and friction

Yesterday we had an inspiring in-house workshop with Elia Faber and Julia Reinemann from HelloDesign on user journeys and friction mapping. Both are staples in the design community, but they deserve a fresh look when your company’s strategy changes, as ours did recently.

Why do so many user journeys and personas fall flat? I had a little epiphany during the day. The problem is usually the temptation to inflate thin research into something that looks solid. It should be the opposite: compress a pile of real research and fresh interview notes down into something you can actually act on.

So: build your personas on evidence, not assumptions. The stock photos may look pretty and the names may be catchy, but they don’t represent real users or how they behave. The result? Design decisions built on fiction. Instead of fiction, look for friction — map out every friction point and lean on the Fogg Behavior Model to weigh motivation against ability (still the clearest model I know for this).

I get it — tight timelines and no easy access to research make shortcuts tempting. But faking it until you find time for the real thing rarely pays off. Case in point: in a single hour, my team and I spotted three parts of the purchase flow we could easily improve, plus one much bigger opportunity — but that’s a post for another day.