James, The key point is "there is essentially no way to generalize from > a well-specified persona to a population of interest, and thus no way to > say anything about the users of interest.
The process should work in reverse: a persona is a representation of a specific sub-population derived from the research. From that process, you should arrive at representations that are illustrative, predictive to some meaningful extent, and identifiable in the sense that stakeholders should be able to 'see' in the persona some real person from the population. The mathematics and statistics in the article you've cited are not very good, and the arguments presented based on those are specious. They ignore areas of analysis such as principal components analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, or factorial analysis; or the basics of clustering and segmentation. The example of "Patrick" is worse than meaningless. I find this statement from the article particularly amusing: "Unfortunately, both personas themselves and the raw data used to develop them are generally protected by non-disclosure agreements. Without verifiable data, we have nothing more than assertion of validity by persona creators and advocates themselves." I'm not a card-carrying fan of personas. The article cited, however, is clearly the opposite. Steve -- Steve 'Doc' Baty | Principal Consultant | Meld Consulting | P: +61 417 061 292 | E: [email protected] | Twitter: docbaty Blog: http://docholdsfourth.blogspot.com Contributor - UXMatters - www.uxmatters.com UX Book Club: http://uxbookclub.org/ - Read, discuss, connect. ________________________________________________________________ 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
