Jared, I did not mean that all your ancestors had children is a negative. Just that this is an example that does not have the inductive issue.
It must be start of summer :-) James http://blog.feralabs.com 2009/5/29 James Page <[email protected]> > @Jared, > Don't get me wrong this is great first step at trying to establish if > Personas work, or not. > > Give me an example of *any* research that, in your mind, solves the >> "inductive issue" > > and we can talk about it further. > > > We can prove the negative "Some Turkeys don't get fed every day", or that > Newton got some > of his assumptions wrong, or "Not all swans are white" . And we can say > that all your ancestors had children. > > The null hypothesis is, if personas don't make a differences, then the >> control group > > (the folks w/o personas) will not produce distinguishably different results >> from those that do. >> > As you show here by using a null hypothesis. So Frank Long has shown that > "Persona > are better than X" The issue is exactly what is X? > > [OT I believe one issue people have with Personas is that there is no ' > null hypothesis' ] > > Scientific research studies like this are little building blocks. You >> disassemble the problem into > > little problems, evaluate each problem, then reassemble them to build your >> case. > > > That works if the studies are replicable. If we don't know how to set up X, > we can not replicate it. > > Sure, there are evaluator effects in heuristic evaluations. But that has to >> do with > > *different* evaluators inspecting the *same* design. > > > So if we agree that it becomes very important to build upon Frank's > research, then "evaluator effect" > becomes important as the study needs to be replicable. So if we re-ran the > study would we get the > same results. Then there is the other issues which Joshua Porter points out > such as blinding. > > But I would agree some research is better than no research and puts a line > in the sand for further studies. > > @frank > One interesting point from your research is that the effect of the pictures > have on the design teams. > The teams with a photo seam to do far better, scoring nearly twice as much > as the teams with > an illustration. Was it the persona's that had the impact or the pictures > of users. I wonder > if just having random pictures of people handed out to the designers would > have the same effect? > Against a sample of photos of real users. Is it the pictures that give the > designer the empathic tool > or is it the narrative. What would the effect be of giving > the designers access to the facebook/myspace pages, > against using personas. > > The control group would just be given a picture of one user - Steve Jobs. > :-) > > James > http://blog.feralabs.com > > > 2009/5/29 Joshua Porter <[email protected]> > > >> On May 29, 2009, at 9:28 AM, Jared Spool wrote: >> >> >>> On May 29, 2009, at 6:36 AM, James Page wrote: >>> >>> I think the issue with using heuristic evaluations is the well known >>>> issue >>>> with the evaluator effect. >>>> >>> >>> Wow, James. You are *so* missing the point here. >>> >>> Sure, there are evaluator effects in heuristic evaluations. But that has >>> to do with *different* evaluators inspecting the *same* design. >>> >> >> >> If I understand James correctly, he is suggesting that if the evaluators >> knew which designers used personas then they would be biased from judging >> objectively which designs were more user-centered. That is, the so-called >> differences uncovered by the heuristic evaluation might only be biases >> introduced by the evaluators. >> >> If this is the case (and it's not clear from the writeup exactly what was >> done), then the results of the study are biased. >> >> Frank, could you shed some more light on this? Did the evaluators know >> which designs were done using personas and which were not? >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> Josh >> >> >> >> >> Joshua Porter, Founder >> Bokardo Design >> Interface design & strategy for social web applications >> phone: 508-954-1896 >> http://bokardo.com >> [email protected] >> twitter: bokardo >> >> >> >> >> ________________________________________________________________ >> 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 >> > > ________________________________________________________________ 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
