I've used these. I think it's a good idea, not to have pictures of the users. In my experience, we tended to use stock photos, and the pictures could bias the work.
Of course, now you have thispersondoesnotexist.com. I just used that, to populate a test DB with 10,000 fake personas.
Thanks for mentioning a possible bug! I looked over the page to check and get it fixed, but it looks like Eddie and Dana are listed in the Table of Contents, but under "Internal Personas" (assuming you meant they weren't listed in the User Personas list in the beginning): https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/personas/#internal...
I actually didn't know about https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/, that's kinda neat!
I used that site to generate avatar images for “users” on my service.
It was only 10K users, which is a rounding error, for most “Big Data” types, these days, but I did send the author an email, explaining what I was doing. I didn’t expect a response, and didn’t get one, but it was only polite.
Coming back to what you noticed about the personas page. Another GitLab team member (u/john_cogs) created a Merge Request[1] to update the page so that there's a "List of internal personas" to match the list at the top :)
Thanks for helping us improve the handbook!
[1]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...
Not personas in the common usage sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)
Personas are a psychological trick for humans. Generally quite effective. Like reading out loud they are to stop your brain not seeing what you don't want to see (ie bugs)
However, we used to use “personas,” in the OP sense, in my previous job, when designing UX.
Like I said. Pictures were both good and bad. They helped to make the personas “real,” but they could also give us bias towards/against certain personas.