The bottom line for me in this entire thread: To those folks who promote personas as a useful design tool, it seems quite clear to me this industry has not done a good job of making clear what a persona is and what some of the better methods are to research them.
Jared, to define that a "persona" is a meme inside an industry list is one thing, but to have the people who develop these memes then also create printed deliverables that read more like character studies for movie spec scripts and lack more practical data presentation discovered from the research is another. (I feel a Tufte moment of railing on all the chart junk in persona deliverables coming on, but I'll refrain.) The problem of how personas became flubbed in our profession is straight forward as far as I'm concerned. The printed persona deliverable -- the only tangible element of this research process -- becomes the actual persona in the minds of those who were not part of the research process. Basically, every one else in the company. Then over a small amount of time, the meme is no longer the persona, the persona has become that piece of paper with the superficial photo on it. Then that circles back into the core process and it degrades the tool overall for others who then try to copy what they see other people doing, which in this case is the printed deliverable. The fact that the persona has become so bastardized as a tool is a serious problem for our industry. We -- myself included to be honest -- need to fix that. If no one wants to fix it, then it becomes the kind of thing that seriously degrades our value as professionals. Why? Because when executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, product managers, marketing execs, etc... When they work with designers in this field, they get mixed messages and convoluted processes. The more they encounter that, the more we lose our credibility. And fwiw, that's exactly why I get so bent on some of these topics. I actually agree with Jared that its insane that companies will spend $8M on sales retreats but the design team has to scratch tooth and nail to get $800K to do the proper research on a product. At the same time, I also know that we don't enough of a good job justifying why we need the budget. Our deliverables and process still seem far too white ivory tower, throw it over the wall kind of things. (And this is also why I harp on prototypes, since that deliverable does exactly the job of creating large amounts of credibility for designers.) It really needs to change. -- 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
