Hi, all. I was inspired to post this question by the very interesting ACD/UCD discussion, during which the personas concept has frequently been mentioned. I've always been a little uncertain of personas, but many people seem to love them, and so I'm wondering if I'm missing or misunderstanding something.
Below are my three main problems with the concept. I'm hoping some of you might be able to tell me whether (and how) I'm on- or off-base with them. 1) *Frankenstein.* As I understand it, the better persona practitioners will base their constructions on real-world data. Essentially, they use various methods to gather a bunch of data on behaviors, attitudes, and demographics from some population, and then reorganize and combine the various data points into some mock person. If that is correct, then it would seem that the resulting persona doesn't represent any actual user -- it's just made up of parts of real users, like a Frankenstein's monster. As James Page<http://gamma.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=35466#35613>said in a comment on the ACD/UCD thread, the result is a fiction. 2) *Efficiency.* If personas are made up of pieces of real users, I'm uncertain about how much benefit is gained from from recombining those pieces into a narrative that makes sense, as opposed to simply looking at the dataset and any potential relationships within it. For example, in his original post in the last ACD/UCD thread, Jared Spool describes the following: > "Recently, I had a client show me their persona descriptions that talked > about the car the family had and the family dog. My first inclination was to > suggest they take this information out. However, their project was a > home-improvement information site and providing filters for pet-friendly > improvement projects and easy-to-bring-home materials was an obvious > no-brainer out of this simple info." > Unless the persona creators got lucky, the car and pet details in their creations came from some actual data -- a demographics survey, focus groups, user interviews, or whatever. If so, I wonder whether the effort of creating those fictional representations of home-improvement customers could have been saved by just looking at the simple data on which they were based. Put another way, was it the persona that helped, or was it the simple finding that some of their customers drive small cars and own pets? 3) *Variability.* Persona creation, and the conclusions that come from them, seem to be more of an art than a science. (Ultimately, design is an art, but the recommendations on which those designs are based should perhaps fall more in the science realm.) My impression (and that's all it is) is that the process of imagining a persona turns datasets into inkblots, with different practitioners looking at the same thing and coming up with different interpretations. If so, that makes me question the utility of the concept. Going back to the ACD/UCD discussion, I wonder if there would be less variability in design recommendations if they were based on analyses of the central activities/tasks that users must perform, along with real data showing associations between user characteristics and those activities. That's just speculation, but if there's any truth in it, then the costs and benefits of personas as a design tool may be an interesting investigation. Thanks for your time if you've read all of this. I'm hoping it will generate a good discussion on the topic and give me some insight into the issue. Mike ------- Michael Stiso, Ph.D. HCI Researcher SINTEF ICT Oslo, Norway ________________________________________________________________ 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
