Looking Back on Data-Driven Design Research Personas

Yesterday I taught a day long tutorial at UPA 2007 on data-driven design research personas. Patrick Kennedy has written a nice good review of the tutorial. I say “good,” rather than “nice,” because it’s honest. And honest isn’t always all positive. While most of what Patrick says about the tutorial was positive, he does highlight a few oversights, or areas the tutorial could have been better. And for that, I thank you, Patrick. I’ll take honesty any day over being nice and PC.

The primary goal of the tutorial was to show people how to work data into developing personas and how they can be used for more than just design. Hopefully, I accomplished this (in the big picture). Additionally, it was to communicate that adding some real data (yes, that’s qualitative and quantitative) into your personas and using them throughout the course of design and research goes a long way in making products better.

On the downside, there were a few people who got hung up on the inclusion of non-quantitative data. Unfortunate. But this comes down to the presenter knowing their audience. Something I could have done a little better in hindsight. But then I ask myself, would it be worth spending 10 minutes on that for the 2-3 nay-sayers in the audience? Perhaps.

As someone who comes at this from the point of view of balancing theory with practice, I too struggle sometimes with the purist academic viewpoint of hard core statistical significance in data. It’s a balancing act in the real world. Additionally, at Messagefirst we’re continually walking the tightrope of balancing qualitative and quantitative data in our work. It’s a real shame that people today can’t recognize the value of both of these types of data.

Overall, the tutorial received pretty good marks from the majority of attendees (mostly 4s and 5s). However, I did have a handful of 2s and 3s from those who were disappointed that there wasn’t more focus on statistical significance and harder quantitative data. The one area the tutorial scored low overall – handouts. It seems the slides were too small on the handouts and difficult to read. Personally, as a presenter, I’m opposed to handing out my slides beforehand. What’s the point of me presenting if you have my slides? On the other hand, as an attendee, it’s good to have them to make notes on slides you want to come back to. So, it’s a balancing act.

Two other things I took away from teaching this tutorial – I could have a done a better job at working the exercises throughout the day, instead of saving them until the last half of the day. Additionally, it was a bit ironic that I asked the attendees to formulate data-driven design research personas w/o any real data – yeah, I kind of asked them to go off of their past experience. That’s only one of the data inputs in creating personas. Oops!

So, next time, I’ll have some real data for attendees to work from. And I’ll have them begin by developing personas at the start of the day. Then we’ll introduce some techniques and data and have them evolve their personas. It will be an iterative process throughout the day. I think there’s great value in seeing them evolve through the process – something else that was part of the persona lifecycle.

And if you want to see the slides from the presentation, here they are: