On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 11:25 -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: > at least from a marketing point of view, you can't ask me to "forget > trying to cover my userbase"... that's suicidal; we'd be telling > anecdotes, not segmenting anything.
You're still missing the point, I think. The general idea is to cover the user base, but the idea of personas is not to cover the userbase. If you think of a bell population, you have 80% within two standard deviations (I think?). Personas are a tool whereby you attempt to design 'average' users that you think most people are going to be pretty close to. By aiming at those personas, you're trying to design something which is pretty good for most people. It's attempting to recognise that the distribution of wants, needs and skills across human populations isn't uniform - most people want roughly the same thing, most people have roughly the same skills (for some definition of roughly), and that there is some polarisation there too. Personas attempt to cover a large range of people, but also includes a weighting of what you think the most important issues are. You can't make everyone happy all the time; personas is just a tool to help figure out how to prioritise who to make happy when, if you see what I mean. Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
