On May 28, 2009, at 11:10 AM, James Page wrote:
I think the issue I have with Personas is that they are, as the
paper points
out, "Fictional".
The paper was bounded by experimental constraints, like all research
is. Supplying fictional personas that represent the fictional users
for a fictional design project made sense for the study.
There are lots of ways to make personas. As I've discussed here
before, robust personas use a solid data background that eliminates
the absolute fiction from the process.
But is there a reason why one can
not use real people rather than "Fictional" people? It does not
answer why
using fake people rather than using real people is an advantage. Is
there
any reason why the techniques developed for persona can not be used
with
real data subjects?
There are good reasons to combine attributes into archetypal
caricatures, but that's not the point of this research. I suggest you
read this interview with Kim Goodwin (http://is.gd/IjFb) where she
states:
Certainly there are some real people who are very similar to a
persona the design team may create, but it's a dangerous approach
because real humans are idiosyncratic. For example, any individual
user might hate the color blue or have some other random opinions
that aren’t necessarily representative of a larger population.
One of the strength of personas is that they gloss over those little
idiosyncratic things and really focus on the essence of what is
common to this particular type of person. That's one of the reasons
why we rely on personas instead of real users--they are more
representative.
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
UIE Roadshow: Seattle, Denver, DC in June: http://is.gd/gxwe
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