On Jul 1, 2009, at 1:55 PM, Andrea Richeson wrote:
Please send your advice about what questions to ask (undergraduate
business school students) when doing interviews for persona
development. I hope to tease out user goals and behaviors. Examples
would help.
Hi Andrea,
Generically, I wrote these articles to talk about focus questions for
this type of research:
Putting Context into Context
http://www.uie.com/articles/putting_context_into_context/
Focus Questions for Field Studies
http://is.gd/1lpB3
and Kate Gomoll & Ellen Story wrote this excellent resource that goes
into depth on the subject:
The Field Study Handbook
http://www.uie.com/reports/field_study_handbook/
However, we've found that you're better off if you don't try to create
generic questions, but instead focus on specific functionality or
content that you're looking at, for instance, online admissions or
course selection. Because personas work best when they describe
behavioral differences, you're team will get the best results if you
think in terms of the behaviors that relate to specific functionality.
Otherwise, you'll run the risk of creating generic personas which
won't easily map to the individual data you've collected. And, in our
research on successful persona implementations, most persona projects
fail when the designers and developers don't adopt the personas
because they are too generic and therefore can't really inform the
design process adequately.
Hope that helps,
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
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