Personas: Dead, Alive… or Evolving?

Eva Muhr (Senior UX Researcher) reflects on our workshop at the MRS User Research Conference in London

Mention “personas” in a room full of UX and product people, and something remarkable happens: instant division. Some lean in, eager, energized, convinced personas are essential for human-centric design. Others visibly brace themselves, ready to debate their irrelevance.

That reaction matters. Because it hints at a bigger question that many organisations are wrestling with right now: Are personas still useful in a world driven by data, experimentation and rapid iteration? Or have they become relics of an earlier UX era: more “poster on a wall” than “tool for decisions”?

At the MRS User Research Conference in London, Michael Thompson (Head of UX Research) and I set out to explore that tension. What we found wasn’t a simple yes or no answer. It was something more interesting: personas aren’t dying. They’re evolving, or at least they should be.

What’s happened to personas?

Personas began as a powerful design technique: represent real user needs so teams stop designing for themselves. Somewhere along the way things drifted. Stock photos replaced evidence. Demographics replaced behaviour. Fluffy personality details (“Loves chai lattes”) replaced actionable insight.

The result? Personas that don’t influence decisions aren’t personas, they’re posters. And that’s just the problem: personas polarise, because they sit at the uncomfortable intersection of data and storytelling. Teams who dislike personas usually haven’t seen good ones or confuse them with segmentations, expecting personas to explain the market when their real purpose is to inform the product.

Here’s the thing, people aren’t frustrated with personas. They’re frustrated with what personas became.

• Those that describe stereotypes instead of behaviours.

  
  

• Those full of cute personal trivia instead of actual needs.

  
  

• Those that never show up in a single product decision.

  
  

Because when a persona is vague, generic or superficial, it’s forgettable, it fades and is essentially a waste of time, energy and resources.

Personas as decision-driving tools

When personas are designed based on evidence, when they reflect real behaviour, real motivations, real pain points, they cease being ignored and actually start to drive decisions. Great personas do something deceptively simple. They reduce uncertainty and focus the team on who matters and what matters most.

They only do that when they’re:

• Behaviour-based: grounded in how people think, choose and act

  
  

• Evidence-driven: built from research, not imagination

  
  

• Iterated: refined as we learn, not frozen after a workshop

  
  

Real personas drive decisions and help answer the hard questions:

• Which feature actually solves a pain point?

  
  

• Which message resonates and why?

  
  

• Which decision brings us closer to delivering value?

  
  

Rules of the game

Here are five rules for building personas that actually influence decisions. Skipping any of them is exactly how personas end up being useless.

• Engagement:

  
  

  built with the team, not handed to them

  
  

• Relevance:

  
  

  created for a real problem, at the right moment

  
  

• Commerciality:

  
  

  based on outcomes, not vanity metrics

  
  

• Storytelling:

  
  

  memorable enough to appear in real conversations

  
  

• Longevity:

  
  

  continuously updated, never left to gather dust

  
  

Something changes when personas follow these rules. They go from being documentation to being useful decision-making tools. It’s one thing to talk about how personas should work; it’s another to equip teams to actually do it. So, we built the assets including step-by-step guides, templates and activation playbooks, to help teams create personas rooted in evidence and wired for decisions. Once you have created useful personas, the real breakthrough comes when we transform how they’re experienced. Excitingly, what’s making personas interesting again has nothing to do with nostalgia; it’s technology.

What role can AI play?

Research repositories powered by conversational AI lets teams talk to their personas, simulate decisions, stress-test assumptions and explore “what if” scenarios in real time. At MTM, we’ve always been obsessed with evidence, real behaviour, real humans, not guesswork. Our work goes beyond research into activation, turning personas into something living:

• AI-powered research repositories provide conversational access to databases and personas

• AI persona testing predicts how users will respond before launch

  
  

• Journey mapping and creative optimisation validate when and where to engage users

  
  

Instead of having personas sitting in a slide deck, we can model how they think, how they choose, how they behave.

Contrary to our expectations, at the MRS User Research Conference workshop, we saw that teams don’t need convincing that personas could be useful. They need proof that personas can change decisions. The real opportunity, the transformational one, is to treat personas as a decision system. We’re closing this gap. With evidence to build them, tools to activate them, and technology to evolve them, personas stop being an outdated and often useless tool and become a competitive advantage. That shift doesn’t happen by accident; it happens by design.

If you want to get started with personas, we have compiled a number of assets to help get you started .