2008/11/12 Kirk Bridger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Of course there's no point in doing it if the developers aren't interested > in using the personas to help guide the direction of development, but I > wanted to hear some thoughts from this mailing list first.
I'd say that we should create some personas, even if developers don't show interest in them. Personas provide a strong narrative focus, and developers are going to argue about how "aunt Millie" or "grandma" are going to use a particular interface element. It would be better to have those target users better defined so that you can refer to a particular and consistent set of assumptions, instead of changing the perceived user abilities during the discussion to match the preferred Also, personas trigger empathy, even for developers :-) This is useful when designing or using the scenarios in which an interface will be used. Pruitt & Grudin say it better: http://research.microsoft.com/users/jgrudin/publications/personas/Pruitt-Grudin.pdf "Beyond engaging the attention of team members, a detailed persona enables them to draw on experience to fill in more aspects of behavior than are included in a scenario or specification. Thus, well crafted personas are generative. In the case of scenario creation, individuals across a product team can independently generate appropriate and complementary scenarios for seemingly disparate areas of a large, multifaceted product." _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
