[Sigia-l] Use cases and user centric design (was sitepath diagramming)

[Laura Scheirer Quinn]

Kathine, you mention "We often develop personas to supplement actor
descriptions."  How do you do this?  I think of these two things as 
in conflict--- my set of personas would be different than my set of
actors. I think of personas as real-world user types, with differing
sets of *goals for the site*.  So I might have a occassional special 
occasion grocery buyer (say, for a online grocery site) persona, and 
then a different one for a methodical weekly grocery buyer.  I think
of an actor as system-centric types, with different *system 
features*-- sometimes even security roles.  So in my example above, 
both my personas would be the same actor, as they both have access
to and do approximately the same things.

This is something I've struggled with mightily, because it's really
a barrier to training people to use both user-centered techniques 
and use-case based techniques, as you have to teach them the 
unintuitive difference between a "user" and an "actor".

Have you resolved the conflict, or gotten around it? 

Laura S. Quinn