[IxDA Discuss] A question about Personas

[Douglas Brashear]

Todd Warfel wrote:

"Real data. Real scenarios. Real people."

If there are real people backing them up, why not bag the personas and
just ask the...ahem...real people? At some point when you "documentize"
someone's input, you make inferences about them or what they would want.
At some point in your use of the persona it becomes detached from the
thoughts, needs, wants, capabilities and limitations of the actual
target audience representatives. 

Personas are often represented by Interactive Designers as "virtual
participants", but they fail to consistently yield fact-based guidance
for projects. At some point a leap is made that extends the information
in the persona too far to be directly tied back to an actual user.
Sometimes, by holding them up as these virtual users, you can mistakenly
set the expectations of your project stakeholders too high.

Why not make cardboard "standees" too, and give them vices like "smoker"
or "compulsive gambler" too? ;-)

- Doug

_________________________
Doug Brashear
Senior Information Architect
NavigationArts, LLC
703.584.8933 (office)
703.725.8031 (mobile)
dbrashear at navigationarts.com

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of
Todd Zaki Warfel
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 11:03 AM
To: Stew Dean
Cc: discuss at ixda.org
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] A question about Personas


On Aug 21, 2007, at 9:47 AM, Stew Dean wrote:

> 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'.

Which is precisely why personas should be based on real data, real  
behaviors, real scenarios, and real people.

At Messagefirs, we base our personas on real tasks from real users  
and include scenarios. They also have a persona DNA - a profile map  
based on knowledge, activities, and behaviors of real people. You can  
find out more from a workshop I did at this year's UPA on Data Driven  
Design Research Personas.

http://toddwarfel.com/archives/looking-back-on-data-driven-design- 
research-personas/

> [...]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.

Personas should be based on real data - not made up fuzzy feelings.  
Real data. Real scenarios. Real people. The realness should come  
first, beauty second. And it's entirely possible to make useful,  
usable, beautiful artifacts.


Cheers!

Todd Zaki Warfel
President, Design Researcher
Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully.
----------------------------------
Contact Info
Voice:	(215) 825-7423
Email:	todd at messagefirst.com
AIM:	twarfel at mac.com
Blog:	http://toddwarfel.com
----------------------------------
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they are not.



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