[IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

A colleague recently mentioned to me that she has sensed that clients are starting to question the value of personas. What do you think, has an inherent gap been revealed in the usefulness of personas as we know them? Has anyone else gotten this sense, and if so, can personas be redeemed? Also,

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

What we use is real people, not personas. We jot notes on each person. Collect and cross reference their needs, and wants. If there is a question that needs answering all we have to do is ask the person, on the other hand Personas can't talk. We can come up with a hypothesis and test against real

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

Hi Megan - I worked with a client that used their newly created personas throughout the site redesign and development cycle. Marketing and development were constantly referring to them. They found the persona info very valuable. In fact, the company had posters made of the persona sheets and hung

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

Hi Megan... Talking with folks that I have know and have worked with across the country there seems to be less and less tolerance for 'ramping up' user research. Particularly in the online market, they need to react quickly... launch something and iterate based upon site (and other) metrics. I thin

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

> > So for personas... that means doing personas without the research... and in > my book that is often worse than having no personas at all. We just cut the personas, and the time saved spend it on user research. User research can be done quite cheaply especially if you can integrate yourself w

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

On Mar 9, 2009, at 6:25 AM, Megan Grocki wrote: What do you think, has an inherent gap been revealed in the usefulness of personas as we know them? Has anyone else gotten this sense, and if so, can personas be redeemed? I'm skeptical myself. Which is why I wrote this a few years ago:

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

On Mar 9, 2009, at 11:59 AM, Dan Saffer wrote: "The greatest pitfall with personas is that most of them focus on the wrong things. Differences between personas are often chosen based on demographics and preferences, not the things that really matter, like goals, motivations, and behaviors."

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

It seems like every time this topic comes up, weird logic is used to conclude that personas have little value, e.g.: 1. Personas done with little to none or poor research (i.e. marketing demographics and segments) result in bad personas. 2. Many people create personas this way. Therefore...based

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

Hello, Long-time persona skeptic here. IMHO, understanding the people whose lives you are going to affect with your decisions is non-negotiable. If you're not doing that, you can't say you're "designing." But any particular method IS negotiable and probably expendable or at least flexible. Which le

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

This is quite an excellent point. Good marketers segment by desired attributes... the hacks use demo, socio and psycho graphics. Those later things are useful in determining how to reach, speak and market to the segments once they have been identified. Its exactly the same with design research. O

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

> > It seems like every time this topic comes up, weird logic is used to > conclude that personas have little value, e.g.: > > 1. Personas done with little to none or poor research (i.e. marketing > demographics and segments) result in bad personas. > > 2. Many people create personas this way. > >

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

I just wrote about field research and personas for HarvardBusiness.org http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/merholz/2009/03/the-best-way-to-understand-you.html The heart of my message there is that the best way to understand your customers is to Go To Them. The follow on is that not everyone in

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

>From Dan's article... "The best personas are really conceptual models, which help you to digest the user research in a coherent way. They put a name and face to an observed pattern of behavior." I'm working with a few startups, and the hardest question for them to answer other than how they are

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

Right. That whole argument (the 1, 2, and therefore...) I put below is the weird logic that I see people using many times when personas are being questioned. A persona and its related process is just a vehicle for user research, and the communication of its (ongoing) results. Just like Powerpoint

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

At 09:18 AM 3/9/2009, Todd Zaki Warfel wrote: We still lack good methodology and educational practice when it comes to creating personas. And no, the Personas Lifecycle book didn't really help...Personas should be based on behaviors and activities, not demographics. And they need to be data-dri

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

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 r

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

On Mar 9, 2009, at 10:22 AM, James Page wrote: What we use is real people, not personas. We jot notes on each person. Collect and cross reference their needs, and wants. That's how you create personas. If there is a question that needs answering all we have to do is ask the person, on t

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

How do you communicate your research findings to your clients? On Mar 9, 2009, at 11:11 AM, James Page wrote: We just cut the personas, and the time saved spend it on user research. Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. ---

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

I'm a big fan of personas, and have had huge successes using them to convince my colleagues on projects things that seem to be common sense. Like, well, that Nuclear Medicine Technologists aren't the same as Bankers. And here are the differences in terms of goals, behaviors, and actions. And I've

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

I was under the impression that persona's based on assumptions were called assumptive personas, and should be treated as such. I vaguely recall being told about a research company (the name escapes me) who have a system that require field researchers to tag their fieldnotes. These tags get aggrega

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

@Peter, The problem that everybody is trying to solve is as Karl Marx defined it is alienation. There is a distance between the end user and the designer of a product. To get a suit made, fifty years ago I would go to a tailor, who would have direct contact with me, and be able to understand my nee

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

In theory, personas are summaries of research, they are *not* the research itself. They are archetypes of the people you've done research on. They are used to record and display the trends you've seen in research. In practice, personas all over the place, as designers create them in many differe

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

On Mar 10, 2009, at 7:31 AM, James Page wrote: @todd The issue here is that personas are a generalisation of the user base. As Christine Boese a couple of months back on the list said: Yes, and the problem with that is? Descriptive, rich, qualitative methods are by definition NOT genera

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

Hello there, interesting post... I've been questioning myself about the utility of personas as well, especially when working with engineers not used to using them in the design phase. However, I still believe they are, and will remain, useful in each design phase: there will always be a moment in w

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

@todd >last week working through 1000+ data points collected So... Just because you have collected all this data, does not prove or show anything. Many people in the stock market collected 1,000,000's and 1,000,000's of data points, and their models where wrong, very wrong. What matters is does y

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

Actually, they weren't wrong, they were selfish, which isn't the same thing. On Mar 10, 2009, at 2:42 PM, James Page wrote: >last week working through 1000+ data points collected So... Just because you have collected all this data, does not prove or show anything. Many people in the stock m

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

If you don't think personas are valuable, don't use them. If you do, do. They don't have to be universally valuable, and they will never be seen as such. Every professional has their own tools and techniques they swear by. This is OK. The best pros are the ones who do good work with their tool

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

On Mar 10, 2009, at 2:42 PM, James Page wrote: We talk about the themes, and give examples using real people. The same way anthropologists have been doing it since Malinowski. Which is exactly what real personas are, a representation of that real person and their real story. I can't speak

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

I agree with all of the anti-persona comments out there. Still, I think there are two key types of personas. Functional Personas are what we are all discussing here, as personas based off of research and meant to synthesize the users for driving design decisions. Influential Personas are what c

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

It would seem to me that the problem w/ the discussion of "personas" is that we are talking about "Personas". Personas is AN example of how to communicate within specific cultural scenarios the analysis of research. The real point is DOING the research. I could do Models more like those espoused in

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

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

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

I've found personas to be a very effective tool. That said, I've seen them done incorrectly and fail more often than not: They are too verbose, they are not realistic (no grounding in user research), there are too many of them for a project, they change radically from release to release, they are d

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

I'm the hard-core persona lover months ago for some projects. And I should say persona is a candidate design communication method, which is not the must for design.and the problem lies "if we use it properly...", so we can easily comes up with local home-made path to fake security. And the problem

Re: [IxDA Discuss] Persona skeptics

It's really interesting to see this discussion (even though it has become a yearly event :). A few weeks ago I asked myself the question: why shouldn't I kill personas? Which resulted in an interesting discussion with Steve Baty, Will Evans, Adrian Chan and Dennis Koks. I translated this in an art