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"the characteristics you care about are hand size and grip strength" "the degree of background knowledge they have which might influence what relevant data the

"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
OK, here's the thinking behind the negativity towards personas: it is an unnecessary abstraction that makes you think it's helping you, but actually impairs your ability to deliver good tools. To really deliver good tools, you need to get as close as possible to the actual user, ideally becoming one. I found that having a manager in the user company "gather user requirements" and deliver them to us in meetings (sometimes requested by clients thinking it would reduce costs) dramatically degraded what we could deliver and increased schedules and costs, compared to having the devs talking with and sitting next to the users for even an hour. (and yes, we did talk to the mgrs as users for their specific needs too) Personas are an even worse level of abstraction than talking only to the managers. You must focus on the very details of the interface where the rubber meets the road, not on some 3rd- or 4th-level abstraction. Even in you get all the micro-details and include then in your "Jane Persona" abstraction, it won't help you interpolate the data sets from Task A and Task C to figure out how to implement Task B any better than looking directly at your two data sets. And, talking to actual user "Jane Real Person" will beat both of those options, because you'll probably learn something new. Always go as close as you can to the source. Abstraction is often just a good way to fool yourself. [edit: redundant repeated words ]
juliushuijnk 9y ago
Can't reply to your comment, so I'll just say over here, thanks for clearing that up. "I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort.." First, don't insult people like that, it makes you look small minded. Secondly; I'm working on a text command based ux tool :), you might just be my target audience. https://www.trueuxapp.com https://www.trueuxapp.com
- toss1 9y ago
  Fair enuf, mostly referring to the handicap you'd be working under w/those abstractions. (should have written "not developing tools under that handicap..." or similar) Looks like a cool tool -- I'll check it out! [edit: +descriptive parenthetical]

toss1 9y ago

OK, here's the thinking behind the negativity towards personas: it is an unnecessary abstraction that makes you think it's helping you, but actually impairs your ability to deliver good tools. To really deliver good tools, you need to get as close as possible to the actual user, ideally becoming one. I found that having a manager in the user company "gather user requirements" and deliver them to us in meetings (sometimes requested by clients thinking it would reduce costs) dramatically degraded what we could deliver and increased schedules and costs, compared to having the devs talking with and sitting next to the users for even an hour. (and yes, we did talk to the mgrs as users for their specific needs too) Personas are an even worse level of abstraction than talking only to the managers. You must focus on the very details of the interface where the rubber meets the road, not on some 3rd- or 4th-level abstraction. Even in you get all the micro-details and include then in your "Jane Persona" abstraction, it won't help you interpolate the data sets from Task A and Task C to figure out how to implement Task B any better than looking directly at your two data sets. And, talking to actual user "Jane Real Person" will beat both of those options, because you'll probably learn something new. Always go as close as you can to the source. Abstraction is often just a good way to fool yourself. [edit: redundant repeated words ]

juliushuijnk 9y ago

Can't reply to your comment, so I'll just say over here, thanks for clearing that up. "I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort.." First, don't insult people like that, it makes you look small minded. Secondly; I'm working on a text command based ux tool :), you might just be my target audience. https://www.trueuxapp.com https://www.trueuxapp.com

toss1 9y ago
Fair enuf, mostly referring to the handicap you'd be working under w/those abstractions. (should have written "not developing tools under that handicap..." or similar) Looks like a cool tool -- I'll check it out! [edit: +descriptive parenthetical]