Hi Robert, If you are designing for yourself and by yourself, then you may not benefit greatly from personae.
The primary benefit for building personae is in the research. If you were designing a social networking site for say a unique culture in Africa (bear with me) then I would think you would be either the wrong designer, or ill advised to proceed without some understanding of social culture and practices in the group. You would have do do some research. This is a drastic example, but it serves to make a point. I managed an online project for Yellow Freight in the mid 90's. We did discovery research with the 5 different target segments and found that the word 'van' had three distinct definitions amongst them. We would have never known this... it even confounded folks working within the industry. The site would have been a disaster had we not uncovered that. We ALL thought we knew the audience... and I can give you a hundred examples of that from the last 12- 15 years. The second most important benefit is the common target and goal for the design team. If you are a team of one, this will be of little interest or concern. The better those persona are flushed out, the more the language and purpose becomes common amongst us. These personae also make great reference points when the project constraints take a decided shift (as it does soo often when business, marketing are involved... or when working agile). No one here is saying that persona are the optimal, only or best tool. But they are a good tool that we can all share. I want to ask, have you ever tried the research, building and usage of personae with a design team? I still think you might find it a valuable tool. Mark On Wednesday, November 28, 2007, at 11:11AM, "Robert Hoekman, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >I've come to the conclusion that I'd be a much happier person if I stopped >taking part in these conversations about personas. Most of them hinge on a >basic understanding of something that no one will clearly define, and a >difference in definitions of almost every key term in the debate. No matter >how anyone spins it, we'll all keep trying to fit everyone else's ideas into >our own world views, and it just never gets anywhere constructive. > >So, I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing - designing successful >experiences without personas, using methods that take half the time and >money of the persona research and creation process - and if anyone wants to >know more about how I consistently accomplish this, you can read the 3-part >article that will soon appear on Peachpit.com. > >Feel free to keep debating, but I've got another client to make happy right >now, so I'm off to do some persona-less design work. Cheers. > >-r- ________________________________________________________________ *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
