> > Here's a nice, solid research paper by Frank Long at NCAD in Dublin that > shows how they can improve team dynamics: >
Oh, man. This is hardly solid research. Now you're just begging for a debate. ;) 1. They tested the effectiveness of personas by performing heuristic evaluations. That's like testing the happiness of a cat by determining the ground speed of a duck. Usability and the effectiveness of personas have little to do with each other. Any decent designer can put something together that does well in a heuristic evaluation — it doesn't mean the app meets the needs of its audience. Not even remotely. 2. They say they set up the teams to be of relatively similar strength, but how was that done, exactly? How do you make sure each team has a relatively equal level of experience, skill, talent, knowledge, and an ability to persuade? How do you set up three teams in a way that no one person on any one team is able to talk the rest of that team into a bad idea based on faulty knowledge? It may seem like I'm nitpicking on this one, but I think this is a pretty important point. Human beings are slippery. 3. The paper doesn't indicate what the control group used instead of personas beyond "image boards" (which are meaningless as research tools). All three of these teams were comprised of people from the same class — meaning they all had received education on personas by the same instructor. What else did the instructor teach these people that they could put to use to come up with a good design without personas? The only thing this study shows is that 2 out of the 3 teams created a more usable design as measured against heuristics (this assumes, of course (and it's a big assumption), that the evaluators did good evaluations), and that they happened to be the same groups that used personas in the project. At the absolute best, this is a loose correlation. It's absolutely not proof of genuine causation. I could have fared as well as any of them without personas and without a team. 4. Even if you throw out arguments #2 and #3 above, #1 still makes it all a moot point. All that said, I still love you Jared. :) -r- ________________________________________________________________ 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
