Coming into this conversation a little late (and thankfully so,
because we've covered this ground *so* many times before)...
On Mar 9, 2009, at 3:19 PM, Chauncey Wilson wrote:
Following up on Peter's note, I think that part of the persona
planning process is to develop a "Public Relations" or "Advertising
Plan" for your personas. That should be an explicit part of the
persona process. This could mean that:
1. Personas are displayed in the work area
2. Personas are required in deliverables
3. The persona team is expected to promote the user of personas by
actually referring to them in all meetings.
4. The data behind personas is highlighted occassionally in senior
management messages
5. Methods used to evaluate products used persona-based methods.
There are many ways to publicize personas and I've seen really good
work, based on solid data, that is wasted because there was not a
solid plan to make people aware of the personas and kept them in mind
throughout design and development.
I think this is fixing a symptom of a poorly-constructed process.
Good process wouldn't require much effort in publicizing your personas
because the entire team of design agents (those who influence the
outcome of the design) was involved in the research and persona
creation. They know who the personas refer to. They know how the
personas will impact the design. They know to constantly ask "how is
this design going to help each persona and their scenarios?"
Any time you have a process where influential design agents need to
receive "advertising" about the personas, you've created the game of
telephone. Important details *will* be lost in the communication and
distortions will take place.
In our research, the teams that get each design agent closer to the
actual user research data increases the chances that the resulting
design decisions will better match the users' needs.
When everyone is intimately familiar with the underpinning research,
the burden of the persona drops dramatically. I think that many
skeptics' complaints about persona process comes from heavily-burdened
personas that don't have the backup data of the actual research easily
accessible.
So, if I see a team working hard on their "public relations" or
"advertising plan", I'd want talk to them about making inherent
changes to the process to make those plans irrelevant.
That's my $0.02,
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: jsp...@uie.com p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool
UIE Web App Summit, 4/19-4/22: http://webappsummit.com
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