Personas & the Persona Lifecycle book in an article…on MSDN!
By Tamara Adlin - Posted April 16th, 2009 in Personas
MSDN is the Microsoft Developers Network, and an article on personas showed up in their MSDN Magazine. Wow. Even coders are talking about the value of personas! How cool is that, I ask you.
Well, for ME it’s cool anyways.
And the authors, Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little, even writing for tech guys who tend to be very data-driven, even approve of quick-and-dirty personas. Kreitzberg, who is the CEO of Cognetics (a company that does usability and ux consulting) wrote the first part of the article, which included this delicious nugget:
Personas do not need to be complex to be useful. I typically begin by creating brief outlines of personas based on conversations with people who know the audience well, such as salespeople or customer service staff. I call these personas “assumptive personas” because they are not based on actual data.
We used the term ‘assumption personas’ in the Persona Lifecycle book too…now I like to use “Ad Hoc Personas” (which Don Norman used in his Personas & Empathetic Focus article) because really, they aren’t based so much on ‘assumptions’ as they are on embedded knowledge that exists in an organization.
Ambrose Little, who is a software developer, wrote the second half of the article…and I’m even more fascinated by what he has to say. I’ve of course thought a lot about personas from the User Experience perspective, which Kreitzberg does a wonderful job of articulating. But hearing it from a dev dude is fascinating to me, because for years one of the challenges has been to help devs understand that even a tool this ’soft’ can be incredibly helpful to them.
I love this quote:
…if you find yourself in trouble, which happened to me recently, where you have tons of prickly issues poking out of your design, it may just be that you need to zoom out and attack the problem anew from your persona’s perspective. Sometimes it’s hard to break old ways of thinking about design, and using personas can help you reformulate your approach. In my case, doing this helped me to see that we needed to somewhat dramatically alter our approach in terms of presenting essentially the same functionality to our target audience.
There’s still a sort of slightly antagonistic thing that can happen between UX people and developers, which is interesting to me as someone who is a student of intra- and inter-team communication and the problem of focus in companies. The deal is, I think, that everybody is just trying to get their work done. Especially devs, who have typically been yanked around by ever-changing, random-seeming specs for years. They, after all, are the ones who somehow have to translate the chaos into a product that works and sells. Not so easy.
But when it comes down to it, everyone wants the same thing. Cool software that people like, and use. Devs don’t want to create crap. They want people to use their stuff. And I like that Little is saying ‘hey, this can help.’ That’s really what it all comes down to.
He also talks about ‘dictatorial specifications,’ which is a phrase I’m now officially stealing because I love it. Reminds me of Avinash Kaushik’s HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person in the Organization:
…even in cases where the team members are committed to human-centered design, personas can help explain what might otherwise appear to be dictatorial specifications. I’ve seen this happen more than once, where a design specification was questioned because it didn’t make sense to some people on the team. They were looking at it from their own, seemingly intuitive perspective, but the solution wasn’t being built for them. The personas provide a known, concrete reference point to explain why the spec is the way it is, which takes the focus of the discussion away from what makes sense to individual team members (or what they prefer) to what makes sense for the people you are building for.
The most astute comment in the article is, of course, this one:
An excellent resource to help you understand personas and their construction is the book The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin (Morgan Kaufmann, 2006).
All quotes are from here.