In theory, personas are summaries of research, they are *not* the research itself. They are archetypes of the people you've done research on. They are used to record and display the trends you've seen in research.
In practice, personas all over the place, as designers create them in many different ways, sometimes faithfully using them to summarize research but often not. (this, to me, is a troublesome point of them...it's not easy to create them well) This is why persona proponents are always saying "bad personas are bad, good personas are good...you must just be making bad ones". When done well, they work for the people who do them. When done poorly, they don't work as well. Of course. You can apply this to all methods of summarizing research, from personas to mental models to task analysis to activity modeling. If you do it poorly, and if you don't do solid research and faithfully record it, then your summary isn't going to be very helpful. What everyone agrees on, as far as I can tell, is that the research is the crucial part. If you don't know something about what you're designing, if you aren't familiar with the activity you're designing for, or the people who do that activity, then you're fighting an uphill battle. So focus not on creating personas (as that's not the deliverable that really matters - the product is)...but instead focus on doing solid research in the first place. If you need to summarize it, summarize it in the way that best suits your team, and don't worry if other people don't like it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=39645 ________________________________________________________________ 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
