When I went to school, chemistry teachers used to talk about atoms and stuff like they were people. Personification was common to help concepts sink in. I think this is sort of like that, creating something a little more elaborate is entertaining and helps the list of qualities sink in.

I definitely think it is possible to come up with emperical evidence as to whether or not personas work - this is where I disagree with you. I haven’t seen any. But that’s outside my field. It might be accepted based on common sense. But definitely would be nice to have studies about - I’d read it.

I think it’s easy to make a website without thinking about who might be, who’s supposed to be, and who you want to be reading it. This gives me a little bit of interest in personas. I’m sure this leads into all sorts of things about using emotions and empathy in marketing - something that is probably really important for people to identify.

With astrology, I think the way to falsify it is just through occam’s razor. i.e. it doesn’t provide anymore explanatory power than what it overrides, so it’s not true.

I am sticking by my point that there are assumptions that are not considered around personas. Namely, they assume (and thus) create a construct that there is no evidence for, between user characteristics and aspects of a site. My thought is that before an entire company gloms onto these connections as ‘truth’ they need to be verified by a more empirical method. You can address problems that you know to be relevant to actual people, but I don’t believe in creating ideas of problems as connected to personas until you have some evidence. Humans are very good at reading causal associations into phenomena when those associations don’t actually exist, so I see not doing this as dangerous to good web design methods.

And I argue that while scientists (like physicists) must create definitions and theories around what they think they observe, the work of say, relativity theory, has led to the discovery of numerous other novel facts. In ‘degenerating research programs’ (Lakatos) on the other hand, theories are fabricated only in order to accomodate known facts. Personas don’t qualify for even this, until the connections between users and aspects of website have been established. I have no problem with personas, as long as some facts are brought into the picture.

You can refute astrology, but skeptics will never be able to prove its lack of worth given a goal like ‘unearth previously unknown insights into user behavior’. On the other hand, believers will never be able to prove its worth. It is not falsifiable. Given our talents for seeing nonexistent patterns, I think that if major time is going to be invested in a method, we better have some evidence that it works to reveal verifiable truths, not just to construct them.

You also seem to claim that “the designer make up fanciful ideas about users he or she thinks are gonna use the site”…for most part, I would argue that personas are not necessarily to be made by the “designer” as such, but rather by some form of stakeholder collaboration. Personas are not brainchilds of the designer, but a collaborative, cross team achievement that focuses on specific aspects of the users lives.

Just my thoughts on this…