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Subject:Re: Are you using personas? From:"Van Laan, Krista" <KVanlaan -at- verisign -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:07:44 -0800
It's really interesting that this "personas" thing comes
up now. I have been trying to get people in my group to
put together a personas doc for almost *two years* with
no luck, so I finally started working on it
myself a couple of days ago.
I have a pretty good idea of what goes in it but I'm
wondering how you determine the details about each user.
For example, if I have a product and I know that roughly
20% of the users are women and 15% are international and
85% North American, do I create 5 personas with one of
them Swedish and one of them female?
What's the right number -- are six too many
and one too few? Do you ask marketing for input about
their desired customer type or sales for input about their
actual customer type?
I envision this as being a tool for marketing, QA, and
usability as well as documentation, so I plan to
share this with the other departments. If you are
working on now or have worked on personas in the past,
I'd be interested in sharing templates and discussions
with you.
Thanks,
Krista
================================================
Krista Van Laan
Director of Technical Communications, Engineering
VeriSign, Inc. http://www.verisign.com
487 E. Middlefield Rd. Mountain View, CA 94043
tel: (650) 426-5158 fax: (650) 426-5195
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