Michael, I'm glad you posted your concerns. I think personas are a great tool for designers trying to resist the natural slide into accommodating every possible scenario in the world. In principle. There are definitely situations when I think they are very helpful.
However, in practice I've seen personas much abused, because they are done > without a good understanding of market segmentation (and thus present characteristics and goals as representative when they are not) > without a good understanding of the domain (and thus present characteristics that are pretty much irrelevant to the problem at hand) > without a good understanding of how they will be used (and thus present patterns in a vacuum, without any idea of what they might apply to or when they might be valid) They advantage of personas is that they are easy to make vivid. The danger is that vividness is made to stand in for a true understanding of the field. As a well-respected practitioner in the field said to me on Friday, in many cases the best thing would be to create movie out of your field research, but the editing is just too much work. Personas are cheap. It doesn't do user research any favors to cut corners in this way. marijke Marijke Rijsberman http://www.interfacility.com http://landfill.wordpress.com ________________________________________________________________ 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
