On Mar 10, 2009, at 7:31 AM, James Page wrote:
@todd
The issue here is that personas are a generalisation of the user
base. As Christine Boese a couple of months back on the list said:
Yes, and the problem with that is?
Descriptive, rich, qualitative methods are by definition NOT
generalizable. That would be the whole point. One can inductively
triangulate data, amass evidence that reinforces emerging categories
of data, develop heuristics, and even conduct parallel studies and
discover points of intersection between similar qualitative or
ethnographic-type studies.
So replicate to some extent, but generalize, never.
Bullocks.
We just spent the better part of last week working through 1000+ data
points collected from qualitative research, synthesizing, looking for
patterns and finding 19 themes, each with subgroups/themes. Those
themes showed a definite pattern. From those patterns, or
generalizations, were identifiable across customers of various sizes
and industries.
The individual stories might not be able to be generalized, but there
are definite patterns that can be found and used to communicate what
it's like for your customers and to provide empathy and understanding.
When writers merge real life characters together the work becomes
fiction. How do get around the challenge of theory?
Bullocks again. How do doctors identify illnesses? Not every single
case of lung cancer is identical. Are you going to claim that lung
cancer is theoretical?
How do you communicate your research findings to your clients?
For qualitative data probably very similar to the way you
communicate to clients but the mapping is one to one, not many
people summarised as one.
Can you describe how you communicate the mappings one to one? How
would you communicate findings from 40+ interviews across 17 different
customers from 5 different countries?
The time saving is because you do not have to create a pseudo person
between the research, and the report. As more information is
discovered it is very easy to add to the knowledge base.
The time spent on creating a persona is saved in spades against the
time spent trying to communicate individual stories of 30-100
individuals and the edge case arguments that come from not having the
data.
Cheers!
Todd Zaki Warfel
Principal Design Researcher
Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully.
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In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they are not.
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