Comments on: Bringing Your Personas to Life in Real Life

By: Elan

Elan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I want to add one more resource to the article. Elaine Brechin at Cooper Interaction Design wrote an article explaining the differences between market segments and Personas. Understanding the difference has proved useful when sharing Personas with marketing or product development, as they tend to be more familiar with making product definition decisions using quantitative research.

If anyone has any other comments, questions or clarifications regarding the original article, I’m here to answer them.

By: Jess

Jess — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

and here's the URL for Elaine's article in the Cooper Newsletter http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2002_02/reconciling_market_segments_and_personas.htm

By: christina

christina — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I like that you used personas to explain persons (so meta!)a

You mention placemats; but I know there are other ways of keepign personas forefront. At Hot we had a big poster of our personas we carried into meetings, and at CIQ I’ve put photos of personas on the deliverables, to provide context for the design decisions.. and i remember you mentioning something about sock puppets….

What I’d also like to ask is have you every gotten pushback on personas: you know, those aren’t real users. blah blah blah…

By: Dell

Dell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

In a Web site design meeting just last week, I found myself wishing I had made the time to develop detailed personas during a “religious discussion” which ate up the better part of an hour. Reading these articles makes me think the effort will be worth it, rather than having to endure more circular debate (with marketing types and others) about ‘the users goals’. You give great practical advice here on how to make personas work for the whole team, which is the real challenge. I think I can give it a good shot now.

I have two questions for anyone who wants to answer: If your marketing dept. has already developed personas actually used in print materials (e.g., Mrs. Smith just luvs our product and here’s why she bought it), do you recommend bringing the same personas to life for user centered (Web) design purposes, or starting over with new personas, so as not to confuse the two? I’m torn.

Secondly, how often do you “update” personas, for example, when a new product is developed or a new customer comes along with a different type of user base, such as an older population? Is it ok to constantly update or change your personas or should they be relatively permanent?

By: Beau

Beau — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Dell – I’d say if the Marketing dept (or whoever) already had personas developed, I would use them. By doing that, you will increase the buy-in for that department, because they created the original, and you have just defined a few extra features/characteristics of that persona (i.e. web-related information). You will also have a familiarity to work from, so that people will know who you are talking about.

You will probably find that you will still need to “introduce them to someone new”, but I would think using what’s there is a great start.