RE: Are you using personas? (take II)

[Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>]

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Miller, Alan wrote:
What I can't see any particular utility to is spending time (and money) creating a fiction. Just pick out someone who fits and get on with it. Of course, if someone wants to _pay_ me to do it....
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But would you take the time to conduct user analysis or audience analysis? I mean, how do you know if you are picking the right person? If you just create a user in your head, you're doing two things.

* Basing your audience on no data, and therefore running the risk of writing everything wrong (because you are writing to the wrong audience)
* "unofficially" going through the persona creation process in your head, because you are already creating a fiction

The important key to remember about the persona is that it is based on data from actual users. If you've conducted your audience analysis, it doesn't take that much extra time to create the persona(s), add a couple of goals (the most important part of the persona) and grab a picture from somewhere. 

This whole persona thing is just a tool to help everyone know who the heck they're dealing with. It's one of those, put a little investment in at the beginning to get a bigger payoff later on. Which probably makes it a hard sell, I'm sure.

How many times have you asked an SME "What would the user do in this case?" and you got a passal of conflicting answers after a lot of ho-humming and backpeddling? How many times does the definition of "user" shift during a single conversation with a single SME? The persona should remove some of this, if not all of it. As John said, it's easy for him to say "What would Igor do in this case?" and he gets the exact info he needs. :-) While this whole persona thing is specfically for deisgning products (as put forth in "Inmates"), it can be adapted to tech writing. Alternately, tech writers can take advantage of the personas used during the design process when writing their docs.

I don't know whether Cooper actually invented the concept or not. And I don't really care. What I think they did do was to codify, experiment and present the idea in such a way that is accessible and doable. Timeing, I'm sure, was also involved.

I don't know. I like it. I like it a lot.

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"And in the morning, I'm makin waffles." ~ Donkey
Sean Hower - tech writer
http://hokum.freehomepage.com

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