Comments on: Fear and Loathing in Las Personas

By: Nadia

Nadia — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:14:29 +0000

Interesting discussion. I’ve had a lot of conversations with my co-workers in the past couple of weeks in relation to the effectiveness of personas, the realism in them and what are the alternatives that would capture just as much information about the user?

Personas are a tool that is used as a design tool for designers and developers. They become artificial when only skeleton details are provided. The qualitative process (i.e. interviewing a customer sample group) is pertinent in bringing the realness out in the persona’s narrative stories, such details as habits, attitudes, goals and behaviours. Playing with the format, outside of the traditional flat paper deliverables is also an interesting idea to further bring them to real-life, such as video format.

If done correctly, personas can be a valuable tool for designers and developers in keeping the user in their minds throughout the design process. This brings up another important element that persona artifacts should be posted around the work area as a constant reminder of who they are.

I would be interested in knowing any one’s experience in the alternatives to personas?

By: All This ChittahChattah » ChittahChattah Quickies

All This ChittahChattah » ChittahChattah Quickies — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 05:57:05 +0000

[...] adaptive path blog: Todd Wilkens: Fear and Loathing in Las Personas Todd’s smart commentary on the tradeoffs, power, and risks of personas as part of the research and design process The search for a metaphor for persona design (guns? movies? safety scissors?) goes on. Tags: none « Making the familiar unfamiliar, or traveling the continuum of appetizing-ness Movin’ on up, 2008 » EMail This Post var blogTool = “WordPress”; var blogURL = “http://www.portigal.com/wp”; var blogTitle = “All This ChittahChattah”; var postURL = “http://www.portigal.com/blog/chittahchattah-quickies-180/”; var postTitle = “ChittahChattah Quickies”; var commentAuthorFieldName = “author”; var commentAuthorLoggedIn = false; var commentFormID = “commentform”; var commentTextFieldName = “comment”; var commentButtonName = “submit”; No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:

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By: Analytical Design » Blog Archive » Personas - Friend or Foe? Analytical Design » Blog Archive » Personas - Friend or Foe? — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:27:40 +0000 [...] Fear and Loathing in Las Personas - adaptivepath.com [...] By: Todd Todd — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:08:32 +0000 There was a long tail-chasing discussion about this on the IxDA list a month or two ago. One difficulty in discussing the merits of personas is that nobody seems to be able to define what a good persona looks like or how it should be used. They variably are used to communicate the target audience, inform functionality, inform the experience, justify designs (probably their most potentially dangerous use), etc, and without knowing the usage context I don’t see how they can be reliably judged. Depending on what and with whom you are communicating they could be better or worse than an alternative representation. I agree with Peter’s challenge, but the purpose of the tool needs to be defined in order to find the answer. While we shouldn’t abandon movie-making because most movies suck, we also shouldn’t make a movie when a poem or Powerpoint would be more effective. By: Matty Schreck Matty Schreck — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:00:26 +0000 Thank you for this great post. I have to admit that I often have difficulties with user personas as well, not so much with the actual concept (the idea itself is great) but with the way I have seen it executed so often. As Finn stated, they are often more like shallow characters from soap operas than characters you would be likely to meet in real life. What usually kills it for me though is when such personas are used in user scenarios - “Jim calls up the web site and it amazed by the variety of services. He downloads a song in no time and spends the rest of his day praising the site to his colleagues.” That’s just sad… but I am sure you have encountered that stuff as well. I would rather prefer to see a persona as an expression of a mind set than as an elaborate setting or scenario for following discussions. Maybe the word “persona” is what I am really struggling with. By: Страх и ненависть по отношению к персонажам | Fresh: новости мира юзабилити Страх и ненависть по отношению к персонажам | Fresh: новости мира юзабилити — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:40:50 +0000 [...] Fear and Loathing in Las Personas [...] By: Bulgarian Experience » Blog Archive » links for 2008-01-21 Bulgarian Experience » Blog Archive » links for 2008-01-21 — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:27:02 +0000 [...] adaptive path » Fear and Loathing in Las Personas Един от Adaptive Path надига глас в защита на персоните - онези забавни артефакти от дизайнерския процес, които отнемат доста време за направа, пъ (tags: personas UX) [...] By: Twan van Elk » Blog Archive » Persona’s ongeschikt middel? Twan van Elk » Blog Archive » Persona’s ongeschikt middel? — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:09:52 +0000 [...] Bron: Adaptive Path [...] By: finn mckenty finn mckenty — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:09:34 +0000 personas are a tool, and like any other tool can be used poorly. to me, they’re a great way of communicating the essence of a segmentation architecture when done right. i think the key is that they have to come from real insights, ideally a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. i see a lot of designers just pull them out of thin air, which is a very dangerous practice. the other challenge is to make personas actionable, ideally to as many business functions as possible: design, R&D, marketing, sales, etc. that takes a lot of work and insight as to how different people communicate, learn, and work, but they can be an incredibly powerful tool if you can figure that out. one thing that i really don’t care for with personas is writing cheesy stories with fake names like “mike is a 25 year old accountant that enjoys biking and long walks on the beach.” that makes them feel really phony to me, so i prefer to use personas as a way of capturing archetypes that represent a particular segment like “the adventursome accountant” or whatever. anyway, good discussion- thanks! By: indi young indi young — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:21:41 +0000 Nicely balanced post, Todd. I’ve been thinking that “telling the story” is a strong vehicle for injecting information into our clients’ brains, yet it is so informal/ephemeral. When I review a mental model with the client team (or set of mental models, corresponding to different audience segments/personas), it’s really a story-telling session, and whoever is not at that review meeting misses out. The stories I tell have to do with things we heard from different participants, which are captured in the model. These stories are real, not fictional, but the models represent sets of participants, or if you’d like to call them this, personas. Videos and cartoons are strong methods of telling stories; can you make a video of a montage of participants and have it tell a story? Probably. That might formalize the “storytelling.”