Adding to Jared's point about validating your personas along functional
grouping lines...all of which I agree with:
IMO Jared black-boxed this step and left a bit too much implicit: "Then you
take the attributes you used in clustering your original personas and put them
on a scale."
There are many ways to create a scale poorly, regardless of whether you're
interviewing or surveying.
I'm trying to keep this short, so I'll boil down the best practice advice (and
I'm sure some of the other recovering social scientists will weigh in here as
well):
1. Measure the attribute in more than one way. Ask several questions for each
concept.
Ex: If you think your personas vary along a continuum of, say, interest in
consuming entertainment content using multiple devices, you should ask several
questions to elicit where people fall on this continuum. This helps reduce
social desirability bias. ("Of course I use all the fancy features of my DVR!
I'm no dummy, I'm on the cutting edge!")
2. Have more than person make ratings.
The thing about quasi-quantitative measures like attitude, attribute or
behavioral ratings is that there's lots of noise in the data. BTW I say
"quasi-quantitative" because it's not true quant data; it's qualitative data
that's transformed into quant-like data. (Basically, it's physics envy.)
Using multiple raters helps reduce rating error. If you have high agreement
across raters, you can be more confident that the ratings are accurate.
Ex: When you're interviewing people and assigning your ratings, have another
person on your team complete the same ratings. (A third rater would be grand.)
Then average the ratings. If you're using binary, presence-absence ratings
(there's that physics envy again), check to see if your raters agree. If you're
not seeing agreement across raters, this indicates a problem with the item, or
a problem with the underlying concept you're trying to measure.
HTH.
-Paul
- - - - - - -
Paul Sherman, Principal, ShermanUX
User Experience Research | Design | Strategy
[email protected]
www.ShermanUX.com
+1.512.917.1942
- - - - - - -
On Nov 25, 2009, at 3:44 AM, Jared Spool wrote:
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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