Although personas are commonly used to represent users in design, their rhetorical function has been little explored. In this article, the authors theorize personas’ rhetorical function as ventriloquization, where one person speaks with the voice of another. In ventriloquizing users through personas, practitioners speak for users, while scripting personas to speak for their creators: each magnifies the others’ voice. Personas represent a strategic rhetorical gambit for gaining legitimacy within organizations and technological decision-making processes.

Teaching user experience (UX) can be challenging due to the situated, complex, and messy nature of the work. However, the complexity of UX in practice is often invisible to students learning these methods and practices for the first time in class. In this article, we present findings from a study of rhetorical strategies of UX practitioners and pair them with strategies for teaching UX to students. While previous work on teaching UX reflects current practices in the classroom or reflections of practitioners, this study demonstrates the benefits of researching existing industry practices in order to inform pedagogy.