User Personas that work - and when they don’t

We’ve all seen them: Eco-conscious Tom, Budget-conscious John, Tech-savvy Emma. They come complete with stock photos, vague job titles and facts like ‘age: 43’ or ‘enjoys gardening’.

Whether you’ve worked in service design, comms, or marketing, you've probably encountered a persona designed only to impress stakeholders. In retrofit though, the challenge is even trickier. As a new and evolving industry, we’re still figuring out who our customers really are. People’s needs, concerns and decision-making processes aren’t always clear-cut. So while understanding users is essential, we have to stay open, curious, and willing to update what we think we know. The question isn’t just how to use personas, it’s whether we’re basing them on anything real.

In shaping messages, designing services or improving the user experiences, we have to ask whether personas really help. Often they’re too generic, too disconnected from context and frequently built on guesswork rather than insight.

But why?

The idea itself isn’t broken. But the way it’s typically done? That’s another story.

When used properly, personas can:

• Focus your work around genuine user needs

• Support consistent decision-making across teams

• Align colleagues across functions on who you’re designing for

That’s particularly relevant in retrofit work, where the decisions are complex, the timelines are long and the experience can be daunting for users.

So why do so many personas fall flat? It often comes down to their foundations and the process from which they’re constructed. Many are created in a vacuum - pulled together quickly to fill a slide for a last-minute meeting, rather than based on any direct interaction with users. The result is a collection of guesses at best, and at worst, an exercise in confirmation bias.

Personas weren’t invented for service design. They emerged from marketing as a tool for segmentation in mass consumer campaigns. That legacy is important. In early stages or experimental services, there’s often not enough data to create meaningful personas. And when personas become a stand-in for real people? That’s a warning sign.

Worth reading: Nielsen Norman Group explains how personas often miss the mark, and why behaviour-based, evidence-led alternatives are more useful.

A decent persona doesn’t tell you what someone’s favourite website or colour is. That doesn’t help you make better decisions.

A good persona will tell you what motivates your clients or customers, what worries them, what actions build trust and confidence and what’s likely to make them act.

If your personas can’t do that, then they’re just marketing cartoons.

• Instead of asking:
  What does this person look like?

• Ask:
  What do they want?
  What’s standing in their way?
  How do they make decisions?
  When and how do they engage with us?

Try this:

‘Linda owns a 1950s bungalow, wants better insulation and possibly solar panels, but feels overwhelmed by options and doesn’t trust national providers. She relies on word of mouth from local tradespeople’

Now you’ve got something to work with:

• You know when she is going to engage with you and at what point in her journey she might be considering outside help

• You can choose the right tone (plain, non-technical) and the stories that might nudge towards a decision

• You know what might build credibility and trust and can design your processes to maximise these.

Good personas are built around needs, emotions and behaviours - not just demographics such as age or postcode, which often trend towards stereotypes and hide more than they reveal. Above all though, a persona should be a starting point for empathy. If it stops you from listening, adapting, or going back to users for real feedback, it’s already failed.

You don’t need a full-blown research project to start. Some of your best insights are probably sitting in your backlog already:

• Field notes from home visits

• Feedback from support teams or installers

• Comments from surveys

• Web analytics or click patterns (if you decided to use this!)

Look for patterns - not just in what people say, but what they do, hesitate over or repeat. Focus on:

• Points of confusion

• Moments that build or break trust

• What prompts someone to take action

Aim for useful, not perfect. Personas should help your team make better choices and act with empathy.

A few practical tips:

Start small: 2-3 key personas:

- Prioritise behaviours and needs over labels or demographics
- Link each persona to a clear ‘job to be done’, like: ‘Make my home warmer without wasting money’
- Run a sense check: ‘Does this sound like someone we’ve met?’

That said, if all your input is second-hand (say, internal anecdotes), you’re just reflecting assumptions. That might help with alignment, but it won’t replace genuine user insight.

Most personas don’t fail because they’re bad - they fail because no one uses them. Keep them alive in your day-to-day work, make them a real part of your workflow:

• In team meetings: Ask ‘Which persona are we solving for here?’

• In service design: Focus on what eases friction or builds confidence for a specific user

• In communications: Match the tone and timing to the persona’s needs.

Your personas should feel recognisable - like someone a colleague might say, ‘That sounds like Matt, who phoned last week.’

They should spark recognition in your team straightaway.

Personas aren’t a one-off task; they’re a working and evolving hypothesis. People change. Services evolve. Contexts shift. A persona that felt super relevant a year ago may no longer exist in your customer base now - maybe a policy context has shifted, or competition has altered client expectations or needs.

A stale persona is worse than none at all. It creates the illusion of insight without the substance and can steadily lead a team off track.

To keep your personas up-to-date

• Review every 6-12 months, or after a major update or service change

• Print them, share them, refer to them in briefs and discussions

• Sense check them in workshops. Ask ‘is this still true?’

• Treat them as conversation starters, not as the final product.

When used well, personas sharpen your thinking, align your team and keep the user at the centre.

When misused, they become theatre - or worse, a barrier to genuine engagement.

You don’t need a fancy template. You need clarity:

• Who are you trying to help?

• What’s difficult for them?

• How can you make that easier?

That's all for now - join us for a cycle of blog posts on topics relating to retrofit, service design and marketing. We'd like to explore various concepts, share our reflections and approaches.