User personas that don't suck.

I hear a lot about personas from stakeholders: "Do we have personas?", "Shouldn't we have personas?". Yes, but not the ones you are thinking of. A persona made purely of demographics is useless.

For example:

Demographically based persona: "Kimberly, a 32-year-old project manager in Tulsa." How will this change our product roadmap? How will this inform our UX decision? Answer: It won't.

Instead:

Kimberly: "The Efficiency Maximizer" → Prioritizes automation, writes product updates once a week, hates redundancy, and seeks seamless workflows.

Generative AI: Smart people writing interesting papers

In this paper, "Unlocking Adaptive User Experience with Generative AI" (Cornell University), the authors explore how we can use Generative AI to do away with non-dimensional, static personas that do little more than garnish the walls of corporate offices ("Let's have these blown up wall size!!").

Generative AI can help us connect real user motivations to site features and actions on-site to jobs to be done.

Behavior-based personas for
fun and profit

For example:

• Casual Explorer: who skims articles but never signs up.

• Comparison shopper: ping pongs between product pages.

• Time-sensitive buyer: goes right to checkout.

AI can analyze clickstream data, surveys, and past interactions to identify users who repeatedly search for "best budget laptops.." → This signals "value-driven decision-making" rather than just a "tech enthusiast" persona.

It can surface low-risk cta's to casual explorers like "Save for later".

AI can surface urgency indicators to time-sensitive buyers "Only X left in stock".

These are minor tweaks to your UI based on behavior-driven personas that can significantly impact you. The real power of AI is recognizing a “shopper” and understanding their needs and mindset in real-time.

Geek out more

• Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas - Tao Ge, Xin Chan, Xiaoyang Wang, Dian Yu, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu

• AI User Persona Generator- Taskade

• How To Use AI To Create User Personas With Examples And Templates- Insight7

• All About AI Persona –  Create Dynamic User Personas with Machine Learning- HeyMarvin.com