On Nov 16, 2007, at 2:13 PM, Jared M. Spool wrote: > First, personas *are* already successful. Many teams are using them > and getting great value out of them. They are not in general use, > but they are being applied in many applications and seeing much > success, by many different metrics.
Many teams versus a well established, industry standard practice are different things in my opinion. I think there's a quite a large chasm between the two right now when there probably shouldn't be. > Second, design deliverables are written for a specific audience: > the design team. It's never expected that they have value to others > outside the team. A wireframe created for a specific team is often > meaningless to those outside. Same with specifications and often > even prototypes. Much happens *between the lines* in conversations > and shared experiences. I'm saying *as a designer* I find most persona deliverables (and even processes) that I have experience with to be little or no value, to the degree they often seem like a waste of time and resources. Having said that, I *have* seen them done in a way I think is fairly useful, and I can also say the times I have seen them in this way have almost always been in ID/hardware projects, not software projects. > Cooper's Kim Goodwin has presented a quality workshop on the > subject, as have Kate Gomoll and Ellen Story. There's no lack of > good examples floating around out there -- you're just not trying > hard to look at them. I'd rather you post the ones for this discussion so there's a baseline to discuss. I've seen plenty of examples from a variety of the people you have listed, ad I have issues with some of them as they currently stand. But rather than discuss that in a vaccuum, I suggested it might be a good idea to post an example to make the conversation more concrete so that we don't venture off into the territory you are now taking us. So, I'll ask again, can someone post some good examples for the sake of consistent discussion? > One could just as easily argue that Dreyfuss's 17-page example is > excessive. If he can't do it in 2 pages, then no one will ever pay > attention to him. But, they don't, because that's just crap too. It's not a 17 page example. It's 17 pages in a book describing the process of understanding your customer, chock full of very detailed diagrams and drawings of real data that can be used by the designer to make concrete design decisions as supplemental to the other aspects of the people themselves, like the environemnts they live in. Often these documents are a single page or poster printout. > Instead the primary causes of failure is (a) a lack of robustness > in the underlying research and analysis or (b) a poorly-executed > integration with the existing development process. In either of > these cases, the persona write-up factored very little. In fact, > none of the failed projects we uncovered were caused because the > deliverable poorly designed or failed to "stand on its own." Sounds reasonable. My experience tends to tell me the kind of research done on this sort of activity is fairly well tied to how the persona deliverable is structured. In other words, people do the research to fill out a template. > So, before you start proclaiming what will or won't factor in the > adoption of personas, I suggest you do a little homework on how > teams actually use these techniques. I have. In case you have forgotten, I have worked on some of the highest profile software products in the software industry. I've seen many poorly written and poorly designed persona deliverables and processes that provide very little utility to designers. I'm speaking from my personal experience, and in case I wasn't being clear enough, I'm all for a persona process that works. I have yet to experience that myself, but I'm not the enemy here. I'm just a messenger from what I've seen. I'm all for you showing me the light, however. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
