Hi James,
> Hi All, > I think it may help people here if I inject some theory into > this discussion. > The first point is that people keep making claims that the method has > some scientific validity. For example Liz says that "Hopefully my quick > elucidation about the original persona creation methodology helps you to see > that the mapping of individuals to dimensions of interest is a relatively > scientific method" > Either a method is scientific or pseduscientific. There is no middle ground. Josh already give his explanation on this, which I fully agree. > The point is that unless you can show that you are designing for Users and > not something fictional then it is hard to call it User Centred Design > Is there a way out of the theory Trap. I think yes there is. Idea one is to > treat a design as a Hypothesis and test it. Idea Two is to go back to the > Sciences that have contributed methods to UCD, like Anthropology, and see > how they overcome some of the Theory Challenges. For example many people on > the list complain about the time that it takes to go through the research, > and to distil the ideas. Ethnography was developed as a > descriptive language. Or go to Activity Theory which is another descriptive > process. If you use either the language of Ethnography or the methods of AT > it will save you time. Forget about trying to get data to jump out at you. > This is called Grounded Theory and it is time consuming and very hard to > follow correctly. Also come up with some ideas before the research and then > test them (in a negative wayi.e.... my theory is not true if.....), again > this will both save you time and can be quite reliable. For any domain, there's two layers, one at theory layer (laws/theory) while the other at the application layer(methods, etc.) , for interaction design, it's about the same. Persona is belongs to the application domain. As guys above ( include me ) said, the persona is based on the user research (more than x% is y or blahblahblah ), and the key result is the people's context, motivation, needs, experience and related stuffs. And we adopt the persona to put the analyze result into some design & communication format, that's the major purpose of this application method. And it avoid this too general elastic users ( which is exactly harm the real UCD) in the whole design process. >From Action Theory's perspective ( theory perspective), human and outside world's relationship is realized by activity, And activity's structure's key components are the human(subject), and his goal (object), and possibly the artifact as the mediator ( physical or none physical). persona is exactly the application method to describe the human in the activity ( his needs, motivation, constrains, experience ) , which turns the theory explanation into practicable method. We don't use the theory directly, instead there's many methods applied everyday, persona is one of the good example. Regards, Jarod -- http://designforuse.blogspot.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
