I’ve just finished up reading an article from D. Keith Robinson about the Persona Sketching Tecnique, an approach to persona creation when you lack real user research.

I’m not that sure about the value of a such approach. You can use your mom, your girlfriend, your neighbour, but it’s not the same as using a carefully selected (on the project’s goals) audience.

Anyway I would like to repost some personas resources:

• The Origin of Personas - Alan Cooper
• Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data - Kim Goodwin
• Personas: Matching a Design to the Users’ Goals - Christine Perfetti
• Practical Persona Creation - D. Keith Robinson
• Perfecting Your Personas - Kim Goodwin
• Three Important Benefits of Personas - Jared M. Spool
• Bringing Your Personas to Life in Real Life - Elan Freydenson
• Taking the “You” out of User: My Experience Using Personas - Meg Hourihan
• Persona Non Grata - Dan Saffer (Adaptive Path)

From a series of interviews and studies on teams currently using personas in their work process, Jared Spool outlines the following 3 main benefits of personas:

1. Preventing Grounding (assume your users perspective)
2. Encouraging Story Telling (a story can bring your users to live)
3. Enhancing Role Playing (changing your point of view lets you discovering design issues and usability problems)

Finally a fundamental pointer is Cooper’s Newsletters on Personas with good real examples of persona’s use.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, Online Resources, External Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.