Jared, I think my issues are more philophosical. How do you separate persona's from been a Cargo Science?
> In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw > airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to > happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires > along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, > with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking > out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes > to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks > exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. > "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" My argument is just because you have based your persona on data, does not make it robust. Is there a way to test your persona without falling into an Inductive trap? (An inductive trap is for example making a statement that "A turkey gets fed every day, therefore on Thanksgiving it gets fed.") Your interview with Kim Goodwin (http://is.gd/IjFb) is interesting, but she does not deal with the inductive problem. The two issues that she has about using real people can be dealt with by increasing the number of participants used, and by limiting the number of variables. I think Feynman said that with a model that had 5 variables he could prove anything. Would using the persona as hypothesis solve the inductive issue? My second issue is coming from Europe is the danger of the Stereotype. It may be possible in the US to create maybe a couple of persona's that describe the market, but in Europe we have over 50 countries. Maybe if your product is aiming at a narrow market it may be homogenised, but for a more general product, each country population has a different level of knowledge. Knowledge effects behaviour. For example Credit Card usage, Internet Banking, Online Commerce varies greatly country to country, and even compared to two countries like the UK and Germany. How do you get around the diversity issue? All the best James http://blog.feralabs.com 2009/5/28 Jared Spool <[email protected]> > > 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 > ________________________________________________________________ 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
