I am a Product Designer (UX Designer) for a major international software > development company. One of my roles is the creation/updating of personas. > We have about 185 of them now. The primary value of them, at least in our > organization, is to provide a relatable reference to our intended users. Our > personas are used not only by the Developers but also sales and marketing > and the folks who write the documentation. >
There has been a lot of chatter in this thread about "scientific" methods etc but one of the things I did not see was the use of real person interviews to vette the personas. We do this quite regularly with our customers, our sales and support teams etc to ask them if the prersonas are representative of real people they know and work with. We use this feedback to round out the persona design. It is an amazing tool for dialoging with end users about their needs because in the end that is the purpose of the persona. It gives the customer/user the impression that you are asking about them not about processes. Personas can also be an effective tool for analtysing/designing workflows because the conversation shifts from boxes and arrows to the integration of people in the organziation with when and how they are introduced into a process. The whole design exercise takes on a new flavour. -- Regards Terry http://www.linkedin.com/in/terryfitzgerald BLOG: http://hitsandmesses.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
