Why Personas Fail

Personas - USABLE Tools

Personas, or profiles of end users, play an important role in the design process and allow developers to better understand community needs and facilitate the creation of user stories and more concrete use-cases for their products. In some of the most challenging security environments in the world, understanding the users capacity, threats, risks, and strengths can be difficult. The USABLE project has harnessed the knowledge of the digital security training community to build personas of high-risk users from around the globe. Learn more about USABLE Personas here.

Leadership fails, leadership failures, leaders fail

Leadership fails because leaders fail to connect with each team member in a meaningful way. Leadership failures can have a profound effect on the company.

Like start-ups, most intentional communities fail – why? | Aeon Essays

Most utopian communities are, like most start-ups, short-lived. What makes the difference between failure and success?

Persona (identity verification service)

Persona Identities, Inc. is an American identity verification company headquartered in San Francisco. The company develops infrastructure for businesses to verify individuals and organizations, manage user onboarding, and comply with know your customer (KYC), anti–money laundering (AML), or age verification regulations.

The Decline of Drupal / How to Fix Drupal 8 – MikeSchinkel.com

Almost 4 years ago I wrote a controversial post entitled “17 Reasons WordPress is a Better CMS than Drupal” that caused me to be persona non grata among some of my prior Drupal friends.

Failures count more than Successes

User-experience is defined by the times when a computer doesn't work, not by the times when it does.

High-Tech Anthropology® Process Tour

Come learn about the benefits of observing end users, creating and mapping personas, and assessing iterative designs. Additionally, see the other tools we use and visuals we create to capture and distill information that will help us mitigate the risk of a failed end product. These steps build the foundation for user-friendly designs tailored to target persona(s) – for products that are actually adopted (and even enJOYed!) rather than tossed to the side or treated like paperweights.  

[updated] Age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say

Behind a basic age check, researchers say Persona’s system runs extensive identity, watchlist, and adverse-media screening.

Persona

Persona runs face and ID checks for Reddit, Roblox, ChatGPT, LinkedIn and Claude, can keep ID scans up to 3 years, and was sued under Illinois biometric law.

Persona

A user-memory system for AI agents. 2022–2026. Memory is going beyond schemas, ontologies, Graph RAG, and vector DBs — computers can talk now.

Position: Synthetic Persona Needs Explicit Grounding and Standardized Reporting

This position paper argues that synthetic personas used in Large Language Models (LLM) social simulations need explicit grounding. By grounding, we mean that researchers should state where persona information comes from, what social actor or population it is meant to represent, what evidence supports it, and what kinds of simulation claims it can justify. Without such grounding, persona-based simulations risk treating appearance of plausible descriptions or vivid narratives as evidence of realism. We identify several recurring failure modes that explicit grounding can help expose, and argue that these failures should not be diagnosed only after simulation results are produced; they should be addressed at the level of persona construction and reporting. We conclude by proposing lightweight reporting standards for persona provenance, construction process, selection or sampling logic, internal consistency checks, model enactment checks, and intended inference.

Why you need to make failure part of your PR plan

Let me tell you a story.

The Customer Discovery Handbook

This is a practioner's guide to conducting design research on personas, needfinding, value, and usability.

Why Good Leaders Fail

The risk of sudden leadership failure can be headed off by early detection of challenges and better supports.

Designing for failure

Nobody starts a free-software project hoping that it will fail, so it is a rare project indeed [...]