Taking the persona discussion in a different direction. I have been thinking lately, along the lines of how we can take advantage of the social networking sites to develop a more realistic persona. While this is not intended to replace the one-on-one interview to observe and gather goals, it can be an effective tool when it comes to humanizing the users. Here are a couple of ways that I think it could work:
1) Given that professional/personal boundaries are blurry these days one approach could be that during the process of interviewing your users, ask if a non-interviewing team member can become the users "FaceBook friend".This allows the design team to then understand their user's frustrations/wins during the work day. Understand their interests, perhaps even draw some commonalities between the set of users they are interviewing. 2) Increasingly people are turning to their network to troubleshoot. This is another aspect that is becoming valuable as we develop a persona By observing their activity [legitimately & with their consent for a pre-determined period of time :-], we can develop more effective persona's. Curious to hear if anyone in our community has explored/integrated this aspect [successfully/unsuccessfully], during the design phase ? -seema ________________________________________________________________ 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
