Thanks a lot for the work, Kirk. I haven't read the whole message yet because I'm mobile, but i'll see what I can contribute to the discussion when I already have time.
What do you think should be our next step? let's pursue this. I want it to materialize. Regards, Allan On Mar 13, 2010 12:44 PM, "Kirk Bridger" <kbrid...@shaw.ca> wrote: Thanks for the thoughtful reply Charline! You've given me a lot of ideas and feedback - see below for some specific thoughts. > > What will these personas be used for? Right now, you have defined them by their professions/a... I'm not sure what will be the most useful - I was hoping to get some feedback from the people who would be using them along those lines. I did not start them off as based on professions/activities. I don't intend to leave them that way either ... at this point the largest differentiator I saw that made sense to use was the frequency of use of the software. So Henri will be the casual user while we have other users who use it all the time, and thus need more advanced features. This would be an interesting topic to discuss - can I create skeletons of the others first though, so my initial work is a little more fully represented? I'm open to changing these - however I'd like to hear from the people who will use them what they need too. It sounds like you're familiar with personas so perhaps you also have encountered situations as I have where personas are created and then never used because they're not really capturing the right info in the right way? I want to avoid that here. > I am asking this, because in design, we tend to create our personas on the basis of differences ... Agreed. As I mentioned above, I'm planning on basing them on their behaviours. > > By the way, what data are you using to create these personas? > Some months ago I create an initial survey to try to collect data from usability professionals. The survey was sent out to this list, KDE's usability list, a linkedIn list, Ayatana's list, VanUE list, and to a few professional usability testers I know. There were only 26 responses. If these turn out too narrowly focused I am very open to putting together a different survey. The lack of data is certainly concerning, but it is better than nothing. I'd like to follow this data set a little further though. As I mentioned I'm going to put the raw data up on the wiki once I finish analyzing it. > Description of Henri: > Henri is quite interesting but still feels a bit underdeveloped. What m... Interesting ideas - give me some time to try to incorporate them. I'm hesitant to focus on Henri's future though as other personas to be created will embody the more professional or more frequent user. But you're right, he is under-developed - I've posted him to stimulate some feedback but also to re-energize the project :) > Don't forget the context surrounding Henri. What elements of his context would impact his use o... I'd want to ensure that there is value in adding these details. I see value in two ways: 1 - adds to the knowledge surrounding needs for functionality and use/tasks 2 - adds to the realism/relatable-ness of Henri. Let me refine him some more and see where we sit - I want to keep these to a single page too, so perhaps a one-pager is good to start and a more detailed personas could be created if developers/designers need more detail. > Another thing I would suggest: don't mix needs with solutions. I feel that it is very importan... The personas I've created before suffered from too little detail for the solution designers. They found them less useful because it wasn't clear what solutions existed based on the personas. They wanted some bounds to work with (and break as they saw fit). I wrote these ones a lot more "crunchy" on solution detail to gauge the developer/designer waters. I agree that creating design solutions at this point is premature, but presenting some ideas for discussion/revision/brainstorming is a good idea. That was the intention here. Again it goes to the needs of the consumers, which I haven't really heard yet. I can back it off if that's the approach the team wants to take. > Finally, I would keep the persona clean of any technology discussion or illustration because the... Could you elaborate on what you mean here? I'm not sure what you mean by illustration, for example. Are you referring to the brief scenarios? Thanks again Charline, and please if anyone else has any feedback or points they'd like to discuss - chime in! The point of posting this was to generate discussion and further exploration. Thanks, Kirk _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list usabil...@g...
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