Comments on: Looking Back on Data-Driven Design Research Personas

By: Nick Trendov

Nick Trendov — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:52:03 +0000

Todd,
don’t let it worry you in any way.

I embed Personae into my UofT Strategies for a Web Presence for the past 5 years and can tell you the feedback that I will get at the end of the next class.

50 % will be good, 25% great and 25 % poor.

The real question is did they learn?
I guarantee that with that deck they all did learn a significant amount. Those that rate you good or worse were not entertained to their expectations.

I suggest that you use previous Persona analysis as a starting point as I do in my classes to speed things up.

Cheers,
Nick
http://www.scenario2.com

PS
I use Personae to facilitate innovation otherwise creative ideas don’t get manifested as support processes are not there and we can’t find the expertise to make it work.

This is done by looking at a future product, identifying process impact on Personae and internal staff required to deploy or deliver. Then compare both Personae to expertise inhouse and train or outsource accordingly. Don’t forget to drop processes or hire more staff if the new product exceeds current capacity.

The usual Persona caveats apply especially about the one of constantly monitoring Persona success measures. Lose that anchor and the customers swap Personae and you get the equivalent of the market going hard right as you steam ahead full bore!

By: Beverly

Beverly — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:31:37 +0000

Thanks for the workshop and for posting the slides online. Would you be kind enough to also post a template for the 1-page persona snapshots? Thanks!

By: Keith Holloway

Keith Holloway — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:00:07 +0000

I thought your slide presentation was a good overview of persona development and it’s uses. I wish I could have the audio that went along with it – so therefore I think handing out the slides is a fine idea – because you still need to present it.

In my history of persona development for web sites, I have found that qualitative discovery is extremely useful – in most cases it is all we do. Certainly quantitative data is important to have, especially for very high traffic sites, but in the B2B world (where we live mostly), end user interviews give you incredibly insight into what changes are needed on the site to deliver the value the users are looking for. Given enough one-on-one interviews the data starts to cross the line between qualitative and quantitative.

I think the nature of the business should define whether qualitative, or qualitative with quantitative back up are required.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:38:40 +0000

Hi Todd,
I attended your tutorial and I enjoyed it too. As Pat is saying I think that everyone could have learnt quite a lot from you. Especially those who already knows about Personas and are trying to use them in real business context (consulting, agency and maybe internal projects too…). Even if you want to add more exercises, please do not take off the part about your personal experiences / business approach.

By: Steve Mulder

Steve Mulder — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:52:14 +0000

Wish I could have been at the workshop! I agree that qualitative research is critical to persona creation, though many organizations get hung up on the quantitative side. Pardon the plug, but I talk about how to integrate quantitative research in my book, The User Is Always Right, including how to generate persona segmentation based on cluster analysis of survey data and log file data. I’d be very interested in your take on my approach.