On Dec 31, 2008, at 7:24 AM, Steve Baty wrote:
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.
I'd go further to suggest that personas aren't really a representation
of populations (or sub-populations): they are vessels to describe
collections of behaviors and the elements driving those behaviors
(intentions, context, knowledge, skills, and experience - as I
described here: http://is.gd/ehca ).
This is why you can't just take outputs of demographic and
psychographic studies and use them as the starting points for the
persona characters. The behavior groupings from personas don't
translate from demo/psycho variables. (Saying that video game players
are 18-24 year-old males doesn't mean every 20 year-old guy loves to
play videos nor does it explain the 44 year-old women who really get
into Halo.)
My push for having personas closer to the specific functionality in
question makes it easier to talk about the behaviors (and less about
the non-behavioral details that sometime emerge when working at a
higher level).
Validation of personas is not impossible. It can be done (more
importantly, validation of the data behind the personas can be done)
through standard resampling techniques, such as bootstrapping or
jackknifing. You can also do it through parallel inferential
development techniques. These techniques are commonly used throughout
the social sciences and have a great track record.
However, I believe validation is a red herring. If designers (or their
overlords) required validation for every inferential technique used in
the research & prototyping stages, all of today's design and
development work would grind to a halt. Personas aren't an alternative
to some yet-to-be-named proven, rigorous method. Personas are an
alternative to shoot-from-the-hip-design (aka making-shit-up-design)
and ego-design (designing for "me") techniques. (And don't get me
started about validation of how marketing, advertising, and sales
budgets are spent in organizations...)
As I've said before (http://is.gd/ehgh), the value from the personas
are not the resulting documents or even the characters as described.
It's the process of the team getting to the personas.
Personas will fail when the team delegates their creation and isn't
involved. Personas will succeed when the team is heavily involved in
their creation. Validation or no validation.
My $0.02.
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool
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