On Nov 24, 2009, at 8:25 AM, Angela Colter wrote:
Has anyone surveyed your customers to validate personas? Do you have
any advice on doing so that you'd be willing to share?
Hi Angela,
To add to what Livia & Todd have said, which is all right on the money:
I'm wondering, by the way you described your project, if you've
localized your personas to specific functionality. One trap that I see
teams falling into is they try to create personas that describe all
their customers for every possible use of all their offerings. This is
virtually impossible to do well and the end result is that people
start to question things like validity.
If you're doing personas that are specific to a set of functionality
you're developing (which means the individuals you researched were all
likely users of that functionality and the scenarios you've developed
-- you are developing scenarios, right? -- are all tied to the variant
usage of the functions), then validating is actually quite easy:
You start by selecting a new panel of users who are likely users of
the functionality.
Then you take the attributes you used in clustering your original
personas and put them on a scale.
Using an interview (I wouldn't use a survey because it's much, much
harder to get right), you talk to each member of the panel, putting
them on the scale.
When you're done, you should see a very similar clustering pattern to
what you saw in the first set of personas. If you don't, then you now
have a bigger set of data to re-cluster and reconfigure the persona
descriptions.
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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