Building on Robert's point ... if the environment is new enough, you may not know what the key behaviors are that your personas should exhibit. So in that situation, your design and your personas will co-evolve, each influencing the other.
What you know about the new environment may be limited to a conceptual model, some scenarios built on it, and perhaps an architectural model that explains how the solution will be structured. The initial testing that you do on your scenarios and conceptual models provides inputs for persona development. You can postulate personas for this artificial environment as a way of envisioning how various target audiences will be served and how they will respond. These personas will be spectators at the research events that you hold to validate the scenarios and the models. That is, as you evaluate the data, and struggle to explain the variation in the responses, you'll start to see persona qualities emerging. There's no way to validate these vibes that you're getting about the personas until later, because until the environment is defined well enough to build some kind of design prototype, users can't respond to it. This happens in training also. The reason that training is designed around objectives and tasks is that if you ask a student what they need to know, they usually can't tell you. Only an experienced person who knows the environment that needs to be learned can say what needs to be in the training. The objectives and tasks serve to outline the expertise of the experienced person. Given those, you can evaluate the student's preparation against the objectives and tasks, and figure out where their skill gaps are. In both cases (radically new environments and other learning situations), it's necessary to do some modeling before trying to draw conclusions about how users would respond, or about how representative users would respond. What makes this an obstacle to persona development is that you may not be able to determine at first what is significant about the users in order to understand how they vary. User behavior is emergent, and emergent phenomena have to be observed. When the situation is new enough, you have to build it and observe it before you'll know what the typical behaviors are. You might have a very nice repertoire of personas, and yet you might not be able to put the differences that matter into those personas until (as late as when) your users get a bit of experience with the environment that you're creating. This is why experience design around behavior is such a great idea. If you observe the behavior first, and then design an environment to support it, your personas are already live and active, and your typical users can just fit right in. Best wishes, Bruce Esrig At 05:33 PM 11/13/2007, Robert Reimann wrote: >Hi Oliver, > >Personas are a powerful and widely applicable design tool, but they do >have their caveats. .... > >Personas are descriptive of behavior patterns as they currently exist. >They are not, on their own, necessarily predictors of behavior change >in the wake of disruptive technologies (though they can help designers >understand this with the right supporting data). Finally, as Adrian >points out, personas are of limited use without accompanying scenarios >that explicate context-based activities, tasks, and goals. .... >Robert. > >On Nov 13, 2007 12:19 PM, oliver green <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > > > I am trying to understand the finer nuances of using personas. ________________________________________________________________ *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
