Understanding what real people will do when presented with your design requires data. If you don't have budget for research, I suggest taking a weekend to go to a place where people do whatever activity you are designing for, observe them for a few hours, and jot down attributes and behaviors that you feel are germane to the overall context and experience. How do charcteristics like age, affluence, preparedness, experience in the topic, flexibility, hurry, etc. impact what they do?
The list you create from this activity is a starter set of attributes and behaviors that you can bring into your exercise that might carry more weight than making it all up. It doesn't cost you anything other than a weekend. Our approach to persona creation involves the step I described above, but a few more as well. It's described in some high level bullet points in this article: http://www.virtualfloorspace.com/2009/09/user-archetypes-vs-personas/ If you want a ready-made persona to participate in your design activities, feel free to use this one: http://www.virtualfloorspace.com/2009/09/using-personas-to-guide-web-design/ Paul Bryan Usography (http://www.usography.com) Blog: Virtual Floorspace (http://www.virtualfloorspace.com) Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47562 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
