[IxDA Discuss] (Ab)using personas to model managers, programmers and other stakeholders....

[Michael Scharf]

Hi,

personas and mental models are great tools for
interaction design. But interaction designers
themselves interact with other stakeholders,
like managers, programmers, marketing, QA etc.
They all haver their goals and mental models
of the process of creating software.

Has anyone here created personas for the
stakeholders interaction designers have to deal
with?

For me this seems like an obvious use case for
personas and mental models. With a good set of
personas, interaction designers can optimize
the interactions with the other stakeholders.

Although the stakeholders as personas would not
be used to design a software interaction model,
it could be used understand and "optimize" the
interactions between the stakeholders. For example,
the mental models of programmers are very different
from the mental models of managers and interaction
designers. A good model could be used to clarify the
roles and the partially conflicting goals...

Any thoughts?

Michael