Are personas still relevant in 2025?

Persona

Personas have long been a key tool in UX design. But in 2025, many professionals are wondering: is it still relevant? Is it useful?

 This article deconstructs the limitations of classic personas and explores how to make them truly effective in a modern UX approach.

What remains true and useful in 2025

The fundamentals of personas haven't changed. They allow you to target the right users and help you understand their motivations, hurdles, and needs. They also facilitate communication and alignment between UX, product, marketing, and tech teams. 

Used intelligently, personas help to prioritize useful featuresor a design routes et adapted interfaces and to avoid designing for oneself rather than for the user.

But for them to be truly useful, they still need to be well-designed and, above all, truly used. A persona is only useful if it serves as a design lever, and not if it boils down to a disconnected marketing portrait, which is unfortunately increasingly common.

Why classic personas often don't work

Many personas are useless because they're too superficial. They contain irrelevant information such as: too many demographic elements, data frozen in time, rarely updated, and above all, too generic to guide concrete decisions.

A persona like:
“Pam, 38, tennis fan, has difficulty logging into her bank accounts, orders online every week” doesn’t really tell us anything useful about how to use a banking application or an e-commerce site.

Result? It ends up in a corner of a PowerPoint, forgotten.

3 developments to make personas more useful and effective today

Jobs to be Done (JTBD)

Rather than focusing solely on demographic data or typical behaviors, this method seeks to answer the question:

What “job” is the user trying to accomplish by using this product or service?

The main idea of ​​JTBD is that users don't buy products, they "hire" them to accomplish a specific task in their lives, whether functional, emotional, or social.

Here, we are no longer describing people, but concrete situations and objectives.

Typical structure of a statement JTBD :

Typical structure of a JTBD statement

“When I [situation], I want [motivation], in order to [expected result]. "

Classic example:
“When I take Uber, it’s not just to get around, but to avoid the stress of finding a parking space or missing an appointment.”

JTBD vs. Personas

  • People : Who is the user?
  • JTBD : Why is he using the product? What problem is he trying to solve?

Both approaches can be Additional, the personas give an identity and a face to the user, the JTBD, itself, offers context and concrete motivations to guide design decisions.

Proto-personas is its continuous validation: from hypotheses to data

When starting a project, it's normal not to know everything. We often start from intuitions, hypotheses, and initial feedback from the field. This is where proto-personas come into play: sketches of typical users, based on what we imagine or guess.

But beware : a proto-persona is not a fixed persona. It's a starting point, not a truth. What makes the difference is continuous validation.

By confronting these proto-personas with reality via user interviews, field observations, and behavioral data analysis  we refine them, we correct them, we enrich them. The persona then becomes a tool vivant, anchored in real uses et scalable.

 As Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean-UX : “A persona without data is just a guess.”

In other words: without reality checks, a persona remains a mere supposition. With a continuous validation loop, it becomes a strategic tool to guide the design.

Personas integrated into the team's daily life

 A good UX persona isn't a static file forgotten in a shared folder or a workshop slide. It must live in the tools of everyday life and guide decisions in a concrete way, over the course of iterations.

A useful persona is a persona:

  • Consulted during the design critiques ;
  • Used for justify or challenge a product priority ;
  • Present during user tests to guide the scenarios;
  • Connected to tools : integrated into Figma, Jira, etc ;
  • And especially : updated regularly, without waiting for an official ritual.

It is the responsibility of the UX designer and the product team as a whole to take care of this persona, make it evolve at the pace of on-the-job learning, and keep it relevant and actionable. This is not an additional workload. It is a mature UX team reflex !

Conclusion:

Personas aren't dead. In 2025, it's no longer enough to have a nice portrait with a first name, an age range, and a few hobbies. What matters is the actual use, the context, and the underlying motivations. 

Modern approaches such as Jobs to be Done, validated proto-personas through field research, or even the integration of personas into everyday tools are game changers. They allow you to transform a theoretical exercise into a concrete decision-making lever.

 

Anaëlle Staelen, UX/UI designer and Product designer at UX-Republic