Those who have spoken with me about personas in user centred design will know that I have been a bit of a sceptic. Nevertheless, we are about to start paying a commercial company to help us with UCD! They are called Flow Interactive (www.flowinteractive.com).
The reason for this post is that in the kick off meeting, they shared something that was far more persuasive than anything I have read on the Fluid wiki to date so I wanted to share this insight as I understand it. So here is the big idea: Design personas are different to marketing personas. A design persona is not a description of a person, it is the result of analysis of *goals* and *behaviours* of users in a particular context. The analysis seems to involve identifying which goals and behaviours have high discriminating power in terms of design tradeoffs, describing them in terms of behavioural axes and plotting real user behaviours on those axes. Clusters of user plots one one axis become a single characteristic of a potential persona. Profiles of plots on different axes become design personas. They *express the user research* in terms of different behavioural profiles *that are relevant to design choices*. So for most of you this probably still sounds like gobbledegook and you are unimpressed that I have now joined the ranks of the speakers of UCD. But Flow gave me an example that really helped me understand the concept: They had a client who wanted some work done on a hotel booking site. The client told them the users of the site had 5 personas - the business traveller, the short-break weekender, the family with small children, the single holidaymaker, and - well lets just say the romantic short stay customer. These personas are valid marketing personas, with different communication channels, different price sensitivity and so on. Flow's user research phase discovered that from a site design perspective there were only 2 design personas - those who knew where they wanted to stay and those who didn't. That is, the marketing personas did not exhibit behavioural differences when it came to the factors that impact on the site design and the user behavioural differences that did impact on site design revealed a different clustering of users into 2 design personas - destination known and destination unknown. Now, this makes sense to me. The next test is to see if it works as well for some projected theoretical future (Academic Social Networking) as it does for some real-world goal seeking behaviours. Note that the slideshow linked at the bottom of the main Fluid personas page (http://www.slideshare.net/toddwarfel/data-driven-design-research-personas ) includes a couple of pages (27/28) that appear to illustrate this concept, but the slides are not very explanatory. I hope this helps someone else find their way into this UCD stuff. John _______________________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
