I walked out of a presentation at UX Days Paris last week. Not because I disagreed with the speaker. Because I needed to stay consistent with the humanism I stand for.
The event's stated promise was “Designing means making conscious choices.” The presentation opened with a lengthy disclaimer about the speaker's situated perspective, the analytical categories she was using, the acknowledged limits of her framework. It closed with these words:
If this approach doesn't match your expectations or your frame of reference, I completely understand that you may choose not to attend this presentation.
UX Days 2026
The disclaimer is intellectually honest. The speaker does her work rigorously. She owns her limits. She hides nothing. And yet, listening to her, I felt something shut. To enter her framework, I had first to be my category. And incidentally, a human being.
That inversion is what made me leave. Not the speaker's political position, which I can engage with perfectly well. The inversion between the human and their category. The shift from fundamental equality between people to prior sorting by situated position.
It took me several hours to put my finger on what had made me walk out. Once I'd identified the cause, another question surfaced. Broader. More unsettling.
What if, in campaigning for inclusion through categories, we're doing to people exactly what our design profession has been doing to users for forty years?
Inclusion means sorting
What happened in that room is not an isolated case. It's a mechanism.
When you want to defend the invisible, you must first name them. To name them, you classify them. To classify them, you create categories. Women, racialised people, disabled people, working-class people, sexual minorities. Each category restores visibility. Each category also draws a boundary.
That's where the mechanism turns on itself. To make visible those who weren't seen, everyone is asked to fall into line. Including those you're trying to include. You're a woman, so you speak from here. You're white, so you speak from there. You're economically secure, so your perspective is limited in this direction. Each assignment is accurate. Each one, taken individually, is defensible. Together, they form a grid where every person becomes a set of coordinates.
The promise was inclusion. The method is sorting.
And no one leaves the grid unscathed. Those you wanted to include are locked in by their markers. Those you wanted to push into listening are assigned to their privileges. Everyone is invited to recognise themselves in a box. No one gets to exist outside one.
Categorising in order to include means dividing before you can unite.
Take a good look, designers
I recognised that grid. The one I was being sorted into. I spend my life building others just like it.
Female, 25–34, affluent, urban, digitally connected, actively parenting, drawn to brands with values. Tech-savvy senior, retired but active, wary of online payments, values human relationships. These are personas. We write them seriously. We present them to teams. We make decisions based on them. These documented fictions have become the shared language of our profession.
And for forty years, we've been telling our clients this is empathy.
Indi Young, a researcher specialising in user research and co-founder of Adaptive Path, spent half her career calling out that confusion. In a 2021 interview on User Interviews' Awkward Silences podcast, she said this:
And there is no such thing as a human who is an edge case. I don't care if you are in a wheelchair, you are not an edge case. I don't care if you have dark skin or you've been incarcerated, you are not an edge case. You are a human!
Indi Young
What she's saying goes beyond methodological critique. She's reminding us of something our profession has forgotten: no real person can be reduced to an attribute.
Of course, the persona has evolved. We build it today on in-depth interviews; we talk about mental models, behaviours, deep motivations rather than age brackets. Better, yes. But even the most rigorous one remains a frozen synthesis of fluid human beings. It fixes what moves. It compresses what spills over. The persona doesn't describe a person. It describes an erasure. It keeps a few salient traits and discards the rest. And what it discards is precisely what made that person someone.
You don't become an edge case. You're put there.
What I experienced in that room at UX Days is what we do to people every day: in our research workshops, in our personas pinned to the wall, in our marketing segments. We look at them from the angle that suits us and call it understanding. The activist speaker and the marketing designer share no convictions. They share a cognitive reflex.
And that reflex is exactly what prevents us from seeing the people we claim to serve.
What is a person, anyway?
Two French voices, encountered at UX Days, helped me find the key. One of them, David Jeanne, designer and author of Le Design Transformatif (ENSCI, 2026), articulates the critique of the persona with rare precision:
The persona is a fictional representation of a person endowed with specific socio-demographic and psychological characteristics. Its role is to target the customer and then the user, in order to improve the attractiveness, usability, or effectiveness of a product or service. It is stable and descriptive in nature. It belongs to the transactional domain.
David Jeanne, Le Design Transformatif
Stable. Descriptive. Transactional. Three words that say what a persona is not: a person. A person is not stable, they evolve. They are not descriptive, they are alive. They are not transactional, they are encountered.
And what that encounter requires, Carole Laimay, ergonomist and facilitator, makes concrete through her workshop on Design du Respect™. Grounding your work in real people rather than universal personas means building a relationship of trust. Leaving behind the hollow objectivity of a prefabricated grid. Accepting that the other person will open up.
That distinction changes everything. The persona avoids trust. It claims to know the other at a distance, without the other needing to consent to being known. The person, by contrast, only opens up when they feel safe. Which requires the designer to have built that trust. Which means giving time, presence, a posture that doesn't classify.
No, we won't sit down in everyone's home. But between seeing no one and summarising everyone, there is a space we have stopped inhabiting. The one where, even within necessary abstraction, we retain the awareness of what we're erasing.
What emerges in the encounter is no longer a fact sheet. It's a context. Not just the place, the tools, the situation. But also the personality, the history, the emotional state. A person is everything that's outside and everything that's inside.
The persona asks nothing. The person asks everything.
The people we erase
When we reduce a person to a persona, we're not simplifying them in order to serve them better. We're excusing ourselves from having to see them.
And what happens to them?
They encounter products built for a version of themselves they don't recognise. Journeys that anticipate needs that aren't theirs. They adapt, or they disengage. Most often, they disengage without saying why. The designer will never know they lost them.
That's exactly what I felt in the room. Not the anger of being misread. The silence of being read beside who I am, with no recourse, without anyone asking whether they'd read me right.
David Jeanne puts it differently in his book:
What if, in order to resolve the complex crises of our time, the true material for a designer to work on is no longer only the external world, but the inner frameworks that shape the gaze we bring to it?
David Jeanne
Inner frameworks. The designer's first. Because no method will correct what a gaze refuses to see. As long as I look at a person while first searching for where to file them, I'll keep erasing what they are. And no one will tell me. They'll simply leave.
The persona doesn't protect us from designing badly. It protects us from having to look at the people we're designing for.
I walked out of that room a week ago. I haven't gone back, but I haven't really left either. Something opened that day that won't close again.
What made me leave wasn't a political disagreement. It was the feeling of being read through a grid before being met as a person. That feeling, one I spend my life inflicting on the users I claim to serve.
Alan Cooper said it himself in a 2006 interview:
The thing about personas is they need to be based on reality and they cannot be based on self-referential thinking.
Alan Cooper
The inventor of the persona laid it out from the start. The designer's mental grid is not the person's reality. Forty years on, we've forgotten.
“Designing means making conscious choices.” That was UX Days' promise. A conscious choice isn't ticking the right box. It's sitting across from someone long enough for them to stop being a category.
