On Nov 24, 2009, at 8:25 AM, Angela Colter wrote:

> The personas were developed based on field research with about two dozen 
> customers. I think the goal is to survey a much larger proportion of our 
> users to make sure the team got it right.

When crafting personas, we use no less than three separate data points:
* Stakeholders—interviews to determine who they think the audience is and what 
their behaviors are
* Actual customers—using ethnographic-based field research
* Someone we know—this helps keep us grounded, allows for validation and 
provides a direct line of access if any questions ever come up

In leu of actual customers, we'll conduct contextual interviews with customer 
support reps and sales people who have customer touch points. We have used 
surveys in the past to provide some additional input but not to validate 
personas. Surveys don't work as well as interviews for extracting actual 
behavior data. With fully fleshed out personas, you might be able to construct 
a survey to evaluate personas, but I'd trust actual interviews of people I know 
more.

Cheers!

Todd Zaki Warfel
Principal Designer, Messagefirst
Author of Prototyping: a practitioner's guide http://bit.ly/protobk
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Contact Info
Voice:  (215) 825-7423
Email:  [email protected]
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In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they are not.

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