Jared already gave a pretty in-depth and accurate response. So, I'll simply add a short response based on some additional experience.
On Nov 27, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Jeff White wrote: > The difference is that there are some situations in which personas > in general are not feasible or realistic, but a time/resource drain > on a project, and thus are not useful. So even if you had a well > crafted persona, it's not adding any value and might actually hurt > the project. Bullocks. Personas don't take that much time to develop once you have the data. And since you're going to collect data anyway, or you should be, then what's an extra day or two to develop some personsa? And conversely, they end up saving a lot more time in the end, by making your designs more accurate the first time out, taking less time in the end by reducing the amount of rework. So, the notion that they are a drain is simply not true. In my experience, they save 2-3 times or more the amount of time and effort they take to create. We've literally seen taking 2-3 days to create the personas from the data save us months on a project development time. They are a way to keep the team continually grounded and focused to prevent scope creep. > Also - unless there is a large design team which is separate from > research staff, personas might not provide any extra value to those > doing research + design. Chances are they'll acquire any knowledge > from ethnography that a persona might provide and don't need the > "report format" of a persona to refer to during design. There are a number of other key people that personas are useful for. Right now, we've got a client we're redesigning an internal application for. All the users are at one site—all 30. However, the client wants us to do personas anyway so that the executives have a better understanding of what the customer service reps are going through in their day-to-day jobs. This is to help them understand the value of redesigning the application. An extra couple of days to get senior management to buy in? Sounds like a good tradeoff. Oh, and btw, we tried to tell them we didn't think we needed them as all the users are right there, but once he indicated why he wanted them, we obliged. > I'm sure I'm completely wrong on some semantic level of course :-) > But, this has been my experience and judging by various comments on > the thread I'm not the only one. Once again, that just goes to show that we need more education on how to create and properly use personas. Used properly, they are one of our most useful tools. But like any other tool, used incorrectly, or not at all, well, we all know what happens then. Bad data in bad data out. Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. ---------------------------------- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com ---------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. ________________________________________________________________ *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
