Hi All, I think it may help people here if I inject some theory into this discussion.
The first point is that people keep making claims that the method has some scientific validity. For example Liz says that "Hopefully my quick elucidation about the original persona creation methodology helps you to see that the mapping of individuals to dimensions of interest is a relatively scientific method" Either a method is scientific or pseduscientific. There is no middle ground. Is the distinction only important as academic argument? The answer is no, and it helps to understand a small bit of history to see why. The distinction between science or psedu science came about because there where two political movements that claimed that they where scientific, and by following them would lead to improvement to everybody in society. The two political movements where communism, and national socialism. Karl Poppers, who you could say his early life was upturned by both movements, thought that it is important to qualify what is scientific and what is pseduscientific. [DISCLAIMER] Some members of my family where slightly put out by these movements as well] He came up with the idea that unless a theory has a negative hypothesis and is replicable, then it is not scientific. In one sweep he had disqualified both Marxism, and communism from claim of being scientific. One of sciences that wiped out by this definition was Eugenics. Eugenics was one of the academic justifications of Nazism. Another science to disappear was biotype. This is the idea that you could predict if somebody was a criminal by their body measurement. Back to Persona's and Liz's presentation. She gives an example about Tom. By my count there are at least 21 bits of data points about Tom. Using the example given by Chapman and Milham (which again uses at least 21 data points. http://cnchapman.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/chapman-milham-personas-hfes2006-0139-0330.pdf That would show that "Under those assumptions, the composite data for "Patrick" would represent (0.5)21 * 100% = 0.000048% of the population, or approximately 134 people in the United States." [If your target population (lets say Car Mechanics) is smaller than that then the number of people your Persona could represent approaches zero] They go on further to say that :- The key point is "there is essentially no way to generalize from a well-specified persona to a population of interest, and thus no way to say anything about the users of interest. There is no way to distinguish which characteristics of a given persona are indicative of users and which are irrelevant The point is that unless you can show that you are designing for Users and not something fictional then it is hard to call it User Centred Design Is there a way out of the theory Trap. I think yes there is. Idea one is to treat a design as a Hypothesis and test it. Idea Two is to go back to the Sciences that have contributed methods to UCD, like Anthropology, and see how they overcome some of the Theory Challenges. For example many people on the list complain about the time that it takes to go through the research, and to distil the ideas. Ethnography was developed as a descriptive language. Or go to Activity Theory which is another descriptive process. If you use either the language of Ethnography or the methods of AT it will save you time. Forget about trying to get data to jump out at you. This is called Grounded Theory and it is time consuming and very hard to follow correctly. Also come up with some ideas before the research and then test them (in a negative wayi.e.... my theory is not true if.....), again this will both save you time and can be quite reliable. All the best James On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 6:05 AM, Jarod Tang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi James, > > > We are told so many times not to use us for our designs, ourselves, or > our > > mothers as the target for a design. But surely this is better than > something > > that is purely fictional. > Persona is/should be based on user research data underneath (at least > for design). This is defined from early practitioners like Alan Cooper > (and he proved why the instantiation of persona should based on > concrete user research in his books). To say it's fictional, one may > miss the point of persona usage for design . > > Regards, > Jarod > > -- > http://designforuse.blogspot.com/ > ________________________________________________________________ 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
