On Nov 16, 2007, at 4:51 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote: > On Nov 16, 2007, at 1:41 PM, Jared M. Spool wrote: > >> You can't look at the deliverables and say, "That one's good, but >> that one's bad," anymore than you look at a designer and tell, just >> by looks, if he has talent or not. >> >> The only way to see a well-crafted persona would be to have the >> creators walk through their process with you. That's probably why, >> when you look at the final deliverable, you can't tell the thinking >> and research that went into it. > > If that's the stance people who push for personas as a useful part of > the design process, then personas will continue simply fail. Design > and research deliverables have to stand on their own, without some > person explaining to you want went into it, or how it should be used > to help someone do their work. Until more folks find a way to make > deliverables that stand alone, then things like personas won't be > very useful.
Aw, come on, Andrei. That's just crap (with all due respect). 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. 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. To say that we have to make our within-team deliverables "stand alone" without the context of the design project is just silly. There are some excellent writeups of the persona process and it's potential deliverables. I'm a big fan of both Steve Mulder's The User is Always Right and Pruitt & Adlin's The Persona Lifecycle. Both do a quality job of showing the process and the deliverables, in my opinion. 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. 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. Third, in our research, the failed attempts at using personas (projects where the persona process never finishes or doesn't have an impact on the final design), doesn't come because people don't see the value. On the contrary, they saw tremendous value from the get-go. 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." 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. ________________________________________________________________ *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
