4 ms·

The best persona's are based on interviewing real people, and I totally agree that you need to keep doing those interviews to validate your design and when the

The best persona's are based on interviewing real people, and I totally agree that you need to keep doing those interviews to validate your design and when the site/app/whatever is live. it's not always possible to be your own target audience, for instance every time you design something for someone who doesn't care about how technology works :). To add/stretch the metaphor; I get why (big investments in) personas can feel like a waste of time, in the same way that you can waste a lot of time on software architecture. It only makes sense if the team is going to use it. And even then for simple projects it may be fair to say that common sense is good enough. Still it can't hurt to invest 20 minutes in talking about the architecture/personas just to be sure we're all somewhat on the same page.

toss1 9y ago
Of course it's not possible to always be your own target audience, just an ideal example. Yet your counterexample is also interesting. I'd say that you need the best domain expert to design something for someone who doesn't care how tech works. Obviously, this expert canNOT be one of those myopic tech-centered geeks, but the essence of designing for non-tech users is to understand the tasks & goals at a very deep level so that you can effectively simplify the UI & process. I'm all over architecture, as that can really simplify the dev, maint, upgrade, sysadmin, & running processes. But it'll take a lot more than these examples to convince me that personas are useful for development. I could be convinced that Personas are useful for marketing, but that's because I don't know that much about marketing ;-)
- juliushuijnk 9y ago
  So you get that best domain expert in the room with (part) of the team and then the team needs to document the knowledge it has learned, to make it easy to reason and discuss design choices for when the domain expert is not around.. "I could be convinced that Personas are useful for marketing, but that's because I don't know that much about marketing ;-)" I guess the marketing people are right then. Everything is marketing :)
  - toss1 9y ago
    They should be documenting the actual micro-detail of the tasks themselves, what are the essential inputs & components of the tasks as well as the signs/outputs/feedback that helps the user do it correctly and efficiently. Zero of this detail has any significant or useful relationship with broad characteristics of some abstract set of demographic characteristics, motivations and attitudes. The team should NOT be attempting to abstract the domain expert's knowledge into some silly Persona, which will lose all of the micro-detail about how the person would actually perform the task. It'd be like trying to build a car and talking about the paint color after you just interviewed the suspension expert that told you about the key factors to the performance being how you keep the tire in contact with the road at the proper angles and pressures. If you are designing a hammer, it doesn't matter if the user is a small high-school girl or an ex-Marine weighlifter, the characteristics you care about are hand size and grip strength, and the range of sizes and types of nails being driven. (The actual roles might be a small guy on the Asperger's spectrum and a Woodsman competing woman -- the persona is irrelevant) If your app is balancing a checkbook, it doesn't matter if it is a high-school kid with their first account or a middle-aged worker -- the relevant data is the key numbers on the screen, and the degree of background knowledge they have which might influence what relevant data they want to see (e.g., novice vs expert mode). The persona tells you zero about the skill set or assumptions -- you need to know the detailed skill set. Their age/sex/race/preferred clothing/music/etc. is utterly irrelevant. I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort, because with the kind of garbage you promote as input, for the output, I don't expect much...
    - juliushuijnk 9y ago
      "the characteristics you care about are hand size and grip strength" "the degree of background knowledge they have which might influence what relevant data they want to see (e.g., novice vs expert mode)" If your research shows you that those are the relevant perspectives to take, then you will base your personas on these main skill sets. "Their age/sex/race/preferred clothing/music/etc. is utterly irrelevant." You only include the qualities that make it a human being, so you can think of this person as a human. So yes you need gender, age, race. If they are not relevant to the task at hand, you can just take the average of your (expected) user base, so no need to spend much time on that. As for micro-details, you like to have a perfect list of all essential. In the beginning of the process this is often not known. It's the job of the UX designer to figure out what is essential. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. "I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort, because with the kind of garbage you promote as input, for the output, I don't expect much..." How sincere. My goal is not to promote my skills, but to explain how personas are used in the UX process in practice to those who are curious about it. Let's say Jim, 31 year old back-end developer in Boston who want to move into front-end development and is curious about how UI and UX comes about in practice. Secondary personas is me. I'd like to learn what the thinking is behind the negativity you see in some of these comments towards personas. My current understanding that the negativity is based on a misunderstanding of what UX design is (it's more than usability and UI design), and bad experiences with personas in the past what wasted a lot of resources on 'irrelevant micro details'. You seem quite passionate about providing a good user experience. Everybody has the right to be grumpy every once in a while, so I sincerely hope you have a nice day!

toss1 9y ago

Of course it's not possible to always be your own target audience, just an ideal example. Yet your counterexample is also interesting. I'd say that you need the best domain expert to design something for someone who doesn't care how tech works. Obviously, this expert canNOT be one of those myopic tech-centered geeks, but the essence of designing for non-tech users is to understand the tasks & goals at a very deep level so that you can effectively simplify the UI & process. I'm all over architecture, as that can really simplify the dev, maint, upgrade, sysadmin, & running processes. But it'll take a lot more than these examples to convince me that personas are useful for development. I could be convinced that Personas are useful for marketing, but that's because I don't know that much about marketing ;-)

juliushuijnk 9y ago
So you get that best domain expert in the room with (part) of the team and then the team needs to document the knowledge it has learned, to make it easy to reason and discuss design choices for when the domain expert is not around.. "I could be convinced that Personas are useful for marketing, but that's because I don't know that much about marketing ;-)" I guess the marketing people are right then. Everything is marketing :)
- toss1 9y ago
  They should be documenting the actual micro-detail of the tasks themselves, what are the essential inputs & components of the tasks as well as the signs/outputs/feedback that helps the user do it correctly and efficiently. Zero of this detail has any significant or useful relationship with broad characteristics of some abstract set of demographic characteristics, motivations and attitudes. The team should NOT be attempting to abstract the domain expert's knowledge into some silly Persona, which will lose all of the micro-detail about how the person would actually perform the task. It'd be like trying to build a car and talking about the paint color after you just interviewed the suspension expert that told you about the key factors to the performance being how you keep the tire in contact with the road at the proper angles and pressures. If you are designing a hammer, it doesn't matter if the user is a small high-school girl or an ex-Marine weighlifter, the characteristics you care about are hand size and grip strength, and the range of sizes and types of nails being driven. (The actual roles might be a small guy on the Asperger's spectrum and a Woodsman competing woman -- the persona is irrelevant) If your app is balancing a checkbook, it doesn't matter if it is a high-school kid with their first account or a middle-aged worker -- the relevant data is the key numbers on the screen, and the degree of background knowledge they have which might influence what relevant data they want to see (e.g., novice vs expert mode). The persona tells you zero about the skill set or assumptions -- you need to know the detailed skill set. Their age/sex/race/preferred clothing/music/etc. is utterly irrelevant. I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort, because with the kind of garbage you promote as input, for the output, I don't expect much...
  - juliushuijnk 9y ago
    "the characteristics you care about are hand size and grip strength" "the degree of background knowledge they have which might influence what relevant data they want to see (e.g., novice vs expert mode)" If your research shows you that those are the relevant perspectives to take, then you will base your personas on these main skill sets. "Their age/sex/race/preferred clothing/music/etc. is utterly irrelevant." You only include the qualities that make it a human being, so you can think of this person as a human. So yes you need gender, age, race. If they are not relevant to the task at hand, you can just take the average of your (expected) user base, so no need to spend much time on that. As for micro-details, you like to have a perfect list of all essential. In the beginning of the process this is often not known. It's the job of the UX designer to figure out what is essential. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. "I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort, because with the kind of garbage you promote as input, for the output, I don't expect much..." How sincere. My goal is not to promote my skills, but to explain how personas are used in the UX process in practice to those who are curious about it. Let's say Jim, 31 year old back-end developer in Boston who want to move into front-end development and is curious about how UI and UX comes about in practice. Secondary personas is me. I'd like to learn what the thinking is behind the negativity you see in some of these comments towards personas. My current understanding that the negativity is based on a misunderstanding of what UX design is (it's more than usability and UI design), and bad experiences with personas in the past what wasted a lot of resources on 'irrelevant micro details'. You seem quite passionate about providing a good user experience. Everybody has the right to be grumpy every once in a while, so I sincerely hope you have a nice day!