RE: Are you using personas? (take II)

["Miller, Alan" <Alan -dot- Miller -at- prometric -dot- com>]

Sean Hower wrote:
<<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>>
 
Nope. I don't make up a person. I pick out one I know will be using the product and consistently asks dumb questions, and write to him/her/it. (Our prodicts are for in-house use and I personally know most of the users.) This technique also worked very well when I was writing power plant operating procedures. The SMEs were also the target audience. After a few interviews (and a few more beers), I got to know that audience pretty well, too. I just picked out a couple and wrote for them. Real persons, who would take umbrage at being called a fiction. Most of these clients weren't going to spend a lot of rate-payers' dollars for fancy processes. They just wanted good, understanable procedures--fast. (Usually the need for the procedures was demonstrated by one of the operators wrecking some piece of equipment and putting the plant down for an expensive maintenance outage. Leaving little money in the budget for frills.)
 
<<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.>>

Even less time to pick out a real person from that audience. And you know the best part? You can even _ask_ this real person to look at the manual and give feedback. I do it often. Damn. Works like a champ.

<<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.>>

Only for those with deep pockets a short arms. :-{)

<<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.>>

None of these are problems I have ever had with an SME. I ask questions, he/she/it give answers. I figure out what it means and write it down so the person I've targeted can understand it. I suppose if a writer were not very technical, or hadn't bothered to learn the technology, he/she/it would need a bit more assistance and some hand-holding to make sense out of it all.

<<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.>>

It's mostly common sense. I learned the techniques I use when I attended Naval Instructors' School (way back in ... well ... I'll say there was some unpleasantness going on in Southeast Asia and leave it at that). He just figured out a way to make a buck off of it.

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

Hmmm. I wouldn't have juxtaposed those two thoughts ("I don't know." and "I like it."). ;-{)

What we're loosing sight of here is that although Award Winning Processes are very nice, most businesses don't want to (nor do they see the need to) spend "extra" money for those processes. While I no longer consult, I am still acutely aware of the economic realities. The client wants his purchase to be cheap and on time, good, too, if he can get it. World Class Processes and Fictional Personas aren't what he's paying for. He wants his manual. So write it for him.

How 'bout that? Time for a beer.

Al Miller
"Chief Documentation Curmudgeon"
Prometric, a part of The Thomson Corporation
Baltimore, Maryland

Everything is funny as long as it happens to someone else.
          -- Will Rogers


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