The Mailbag personas also generated comments. One commenter suggested adding an additional persona, as users of large email collections are likely to be a combination of Isaac Hoffman and Teresa Burns. While we agree many potential users will have some combination of these skills, but we feel that it’s better to have two very different personas to ensure we can support both skill sets and backgrounds.

Another commenter suggested that we remove the photos from the personas, since they may limit my view of the kinds of people that are in these roles. We agree that the process of making the personas was a little awkward, particularly that these are photos of real people. Though we did use openly licensed images and hope that these people were compensated, it is weird including them in our project. Most of us are new to this methodology and it seems like including photos is generally seen as a best practice but has sometimes been challenged. We definitely want to keep in mind that these are only single examples of the people in these roles, just like real life. We can definitely see how problematic personas might serve to reinforce stereotypes. Still, we may still be silently using stereotypes when addressing personas without demographic information, and using photos may help to bring those mental models out into the open. Overall we feel that adding images to the personas brings a bit of life to them and helps us to better emphasize with our users. They were really helpful in guiding our thinking for the other questions that were raised. Though please comment if we’re off base!