My practice has shown that the critical distinction in creating personas and models is whether or not you do it based on real contextual data. I have had great success with first going and observing/interviewing actual users in their work context or even in the lab, before creating anything new.
Working with real data is not always possible - initially you may have to create some personas based on your best understanding of the product and market. What you can do then, though, is to gather user data, and seeing how it matches with your previous work. I think either one is fine, but you'll notice how they both involve real user data. I don't think it's possible to just "create" a persona out of the blue (well, you can do it, but you may be far off). I think of personas more of a synthesis and salient capturing of what I've seen in the world. And now I've got this far, I realized I was answering completely the wrong question :-) because you were asking about the role. not just process. I think it's an interaction designer role and rests with UX design, but throughout the process, you can involve other people - e.g if you involve people from Marketing when going to interview users, it may be very eye-opening to them, they will become vested and interested in the process and will actually use your personas, which is the real goal of your work. rgds, Jaanus jaanuskase.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36106 ________________________________________________________________ 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
