Bias free personas

When we write persona profiles based on personal opinion and experiences, we tend to include a lot of the persona's biography, which can diminish the value of the persona.

Bentley University has written a brilliant article why this is a problem here.

Even though it is very hard to avoid bias in persona profiles, we can take a few steps to make them more usable and inclusive:

Avoid assigning real names to Personas, instead include the occupation, their preferences or their goals in the name field. Examples: "The music teacher", "The bookworm", "The wine lover"

Use an image that does not depict an actual person. Personas for Jira takes care of this by displaying these kind of images by default. However, you can always search for whichever photo you want.

Build the profile driven by actual data. You can avoid fallacies and personal opinion this way. Keep in mind people with disabilities or other individual differences - when in doubt, create another persona to address their point of view better. Do you have any other tips to build better personas? Be sure to let us know!