Work2026
Personae
A persona library built on IBM Carbon, where every profile links out to its research and every reader can flag a claim that no longer holds.
- Role
- Design system integration and build
- Year
- 2026
- Next.js 15
- IBM Carbon
- MDX
- NextAuth
- Resend
- D3 geo
Personae is a browsable library of customer and employee personas. The version that ships publicly describes an invented work management product, because the interesting part was never the personas themselves. It was what happens to a persona six months after the research ends.
The problem underneath the brief
Personas rot. They are published with confidence, printed onto a wall, and then the market moves and nobody has the standing to say that the persona is now wrong. The document outlives the research, and because it looks finished, it keeps being cited.
6
Personas in the sample set
Every one labelled as sample material in its opening line.
4
Linked notebooks
Each profile points back at the research it came from.
1
Flag action per claim
Anyone reading can mark a statement as no longer true.
How it is built
IBM Carbon supplies the design system, which was the right call for a document heavy internal tool and the wrong call for anything with a marketing tone. Carbon has opinions, and taking them wholesale meant the interface argued about layout far less than a bespoke system would have. The content is MDX so a persona can embed a chart or a regional breakdown inline, and a D3 geo map renders the country notes without shipping a mapping library to every page.
The flag flow is the part I would build again anywhere. Any reader can mark a specific claim as possibly incorrect, with a short reason. The flag is logged and mailed to an admin through Resend. There is no approval workflow and no moderation queue, because adding either one raises the cost of flagging above the cost of quietly disbelieving the document.
What I would keep
Linking every profile to its source notebook, and treating a persona as a dated claim rather than a finished artefact. Both are one line of frontmatter and they change how the document is read.