----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Patton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Jared M. Spool'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "'Todd Zaki Warfel'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "'Jeff White'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "'ixd-discussion'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 5:40 AM Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Examples where personas are *not* useful
Jeff, I agree 100%. But looking at the title, I'm thinking that my example below is a case where personas were useful, but they were not the extensive data gathering type that Jared mentioned. As a consultant, I can't get clients to buy in to do quantitative surveys of their customers to form the basis of personas. If they did, I'd call that a customer profile, not a persona anyway, and it would be totally subject to the survey creators questions, and possibly not cover all aspects of customer experience. On a recent project, I had the designers create 4 personas based on their experience with customers, representing the spectrum of customer types and use cases. They put them up on the wall in the conference room where we met. These were based on a number of customer visits, (another difficult idea to sell) so they were not totally fabricated so they knew from firsthand experience watching customers. This I think made a big difference. I knew that it was successful when the designers and others in the meeting room constantly referred to the wall posted personas by name when arguing their points, so the arguments were much more constructive and everyone had a shared view of the customer. I think that was much more powerful than whether details based on survey data might have informed the emerging design. So I agree with you that any assumptions, as long as they are shared, are a good starting point for design. >>Finally, I find that even a crappy pile of assumptions we all agree to use as a common design target is better than no design target - or the disparate assumptions a group of designers and developers carry around in their head and don't have any easy way to share. Ron Perkins, Principal, www.designperspectives.com ________________________________________________________________ *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
