[IxDA Discuss] A question about Personas

[W Evans]

I agree that personas - without backup material is next to useless - as
useless as sitting around talking abstractly about what XX would like to do
under YY conditions. If the personas aren't based on real research, they
don't serve much use. The backup source material, including notes from real
interviews - is invaluable. Survey responses with cleaned data in pivot
tables is also really useful in quantifying the goals of users -- but in
Stews case - if its just fictional stories, beautifully designed, and
signifying nothing relative to real people/users/customers that are actual
audiences for the product - then they are of little value other than
spending money.

On 8/21/07, Stew Dean <stewdean at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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-- 
~ we

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

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