[IxDA Discuss] A question about Personas

[Stew Dean]

On 21/08/07, 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'm going to go against the general wisdom here and say instead of
creating Personas instead base your activity upon real user tasks. The
danger with personas is they can turn into the kinds of pencil
portraits that marketing enjoy using and this can lead onto filling in
the gaps with 'made up stuff'.

Instead I would highly recommend scenarios - (sure give the person
doing the scenario a name, but think about using a real person if you
can).

I say this because I have worked as a contractor with a well
established interactive company and when asked for source material was
given a set of personas, and little else. The personas where next to
useless as they had indication of what was real and what was imagined
and how the conclusions in the personas where reached. The personas
incidently where beautiful, had had many weeks work put into them,
lavish graphic design and wonderful writing and went into lots of
pointless detail - they just simply where too far removed from real
users.

So just to repeat - I would advise against using personas and instead
focus upon common tasks of real users if you want to get the job done.
If you're trying to impress stakeholders - heh - go do some pretty
personas.

-- 
Stewart Dean