On Nov 27, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Jeff White wrote: > Also - unless there is a large design team which is separate from > research staff, personas might not provide any extra value to those > doing research + design. Chances are they'll acquire any knowledge > from ethnography that a persona might provide and don't need the > "report format" of a persona to refer to during design.
I'm not going to try to answer for Alan. (Did that once. Vowed to never do it again. :) ). However, there are some factual inaccuracies with this paragraph I'd like to point out, having studied in-depth how teams are using personas. Most of the teams we've studied who make the best use of personas are small -- typically 3-5 individuals on the core team. (We divide persona creation teams into a core team, who dedicate their resources to the project, and an auxiliary, who are important to the creation, but can't dedicate resources for more than a few hours a week.) Typically, the core team members do all the field research and, in many cases, each member visited the majority, if not all, of the field sites. It is these smaller teams that we've found see the most benefit from a persona project. Larger teams, where many of the team members don't get direct access to the field visits seem to get less value. The big take away we've had is you are better off with everyone on the team having field access. One of the problems of field research is the volume of raw data you collect. If you spend a reasonable time with the informant (what we call the participant in an ethnographic study), you'll collect a ton of information and artifacts. (A "reasonable time" is at least 90 minutes, but often as long as 3 or 4 hours. For some projects, a day or two is warranted.) Just because you have a ton of data doesn't mean you understand its implications or how it should influence the design. In fact, field research done well, in its early stage, will only confuse what you thought you knew. (Good research disorients before it reveals a direction.) The value of the persona creation project is to provide a structured method of taking this chaotic data and bringing it to order. The teams in our research that got the most out of their persona projects spent a lot of time discussing and organizing the raw data. (On average, the analysis period is 125% of the field research time. A team that spent 6 days in the field would spend 8 or 9 days doing analysis.) The "report format" (as you called it) is the deliverable known as the persona description. Our research shows this is the least valuable element of the process. (Yet, interestingly enough, it's seems to be what everyone who objects to personas focuses on.) As I've said before on this list, teams that make effective use of personas see this deliverable as a souvenir of their journey and don't give it a lot of weight. It's value is mostly for integration into the development process, to bring out during design and development discussions for "talking points". You can have a very successful persona project without ever creating or using the persona description. (Successful, in our research, means the team rates it as being an essential process contributor to the success of the overall project.) So, in fact, based on the research we've done, none of the statements in your paragraph prove to be true. Just wanted to point that out before we took them as fact. Jared Jared M. Spool User Interface Engineering 510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845 e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] p: +1 978 327 5561 http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks ________________________________________________________________ *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
