I agree with Todd to base it on the observed data. I used your email as an educational note to our internal team. Here is my email to my team cut and pasted here.
Below – in the attached email “Personas: how many is too many?” - is a very common problem in using personas. People naively differentiate them on marketing terms or consumer types. That is not a persona. Personas aren’t stratified by variables like income (imagine a 0-50K, 50-100K, 100k+ ) or race, or even task (heart surgeon, bone surgeon, brain surgeon). Marketing departments try to differentiate target markets based on these variables, and that is a different methodology which we won’t go into. Personas are discovered through ethnographic (observational) research, not made up. They are only differentiated by goals – same goals, same persona. Personas are a deep finding, kind of like Jungian archetypes (ENTP etc) if you are familiar with those. Usually primary personas need a specific product design dedicated for them, because their goals are so different from the others. Our goal with personas is to ultimately design a product for each one, and thereby move from making one all-inclusive product trying to serve all needs for everyone, to specific products for each “Primary Persona”. Navid On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 12:17 AM, charles Sue-Wah-Sing <charl...@nexklix.com > wrote: > There is this project I'm working on that is for pet owners, breeders > and vets. They have identified 15 consumer types between the three > main segments I've mentioned. The client is requesting we create > personas for all 15. ________________________________________________________________ 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
