[IxDA Discuss] A question about Personas

[W Evans]

Robin, great to hear you are trying to introduce personas into the
development process - find out everything you can and creating compelling
archetypes of your user segments is an important first step. I highly
recommend a book just on personas for web applications - it's cheap and
chock full of great information about how to development them, why,
including everything from strategy down to dirty tactics - The User Is
Always Right,<http://www.amazon.com/User-Always-Right-Practical-Creating/dp/0321434536/ref=sr_1_1/002-5955180-9985634?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187702041&sr=8-1>by
Mulder and Yar. check it out. (I don't know the authors, and have no
financial gain here - I just finished the book a few weeks ago, and found it
very useful, even though I have been doing personas for years).

I seriously doubt a highly interaction web application needs a persona
repository and here is why -- you really only need between 3-6 user
roles/personas to flesh out most of the goals, behaviors, and attitudes of
80% of your expected user base. Anything more than that and you may need to
divide your application - for instance if you have a web application with a
front end for business customers and personal customers (like a bank), then
you might have 2 sets of 3-6 personas.

Now the research, questionnaires, interviews, surveys, market research that
goes into personas could cover a lot of information, probably in MS Excel,
or something like that - but there is no need to create an xml based
repository - as more eloquently put that I ever could - in the book dreaming
in code - that would be spending your time sharpening your ax and less time
cutting down trees.

Hope this helps,

-- 
~ will

-------------------------------------
n:     will evans
t:      user experience architect
e:     wkevans4 at gmail.com

-------------------------------------



On 8/20/07, Robin Cottiss <rcottiss at cottiss.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>
>
> I am becoming really interested in personas. I come from a product
> management background but I am working with a client to help them define
> their requirements for a highly interactive web application. I want them
> to
> approach the design from a User Experience perspective and feel that
> developing some personas as early as possible in the discovery/design
> stage
> will be valuable.
>
>
>
> I am wondering if it would be valuable to create a repository of personas
> as
> templates or starting points for interaction design. Does such a thing
> exist
> already? Would a persona repository be of value to design professionals?
> If
> a repository would have value I envisage an interchangeable format (?XML)
> to
> give some structure to the data. Even if a persona definition is mostly
> narrative I believe a good persona would have some important attributes.
>
>
>
> Any comments?
>
>
>
> Thanks, Robin
>
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