> > And how is activity theory incompatible with persona creation and > dissemination?
The challenge here is that you are using something that is fictional to convey something that is based on real data. That is not to say that Activity Theory is answer, and I agree that AT maybe should be part of the Tool set. When you use a Persona you are adding Fictional information to help bring to life boring dry data. I will take Jared's example of the nurses workstation. Let us image that we carried out observations of 32 nurses (n=32). We took the data and to help us convey this information to the rest of the team we create 5 Personas (p=5). To further use some of Jared examples lets us imagine that 3 of them have poor eyesight, 6 of them are training nurses, 10 them have many years experience, 10 of them are on short teem rotation, and 3 of them have a family dog. We combine the data from different real nurses, into Personas, to make it easier to understand, and convey the information to the rest of the team. So we create a Persona who has poor eyesight, and is a training nurse. We create another one who has a family dog and is on short term rotation. We are challenged because none of real nurses actually have both poor eyesight and are training nurse, and none of them are on short term rotation and have a dog. None of 5 Personas represent any of the 32 real participants. We effectively thrown away all our data away. Instead of the 5 personas representing 30 nurses, what we end up with is 5 personas and 30 nurses. We effectively end up with a fictional brief. There may be an argument that you could use a Throw Away Persona, as Norman suggests..... A one time example, as I have used here. Jared argues to reduce the amount of information for each persona, I guess to get around this issue. Why not go all the way and then just label each of the subject with a name? Throw out the fake and not the real data. Activity Theory is describing behaviour that is happening at the point of research. Like Ethnography it is not a predictive method. While I from what I can understand people are using Personas as a way of predicating behaviour. Personally I don't think AT is the answer, but UCD needs some philosophy. Both Art and Science has Theory to help. All the best James On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 10:57 AM, Jared Spool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 13, 2008, at 5:49 AM, James Page wrote: > > The point I am trying to make is that Activity Theory output is the >> activity >> and actions of individuals. >> >> The Persona acts as a stereotype between real users and the designer. >> >> There may be a problem with Activity Theory been dry. One can see from >> this discussion that people don't understand it. But the advantage that it >> has got is that it has got a theory. And it is based on the behaviour >> of individuals. >> >> Activity Theory has allot of problems, and don't think it is ideal, but at >> least it does have a theory to back it self up with. >> > > And how is activity theory incompatible with persona creation and > dissemination? > > (the other) Jared > > > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
