[Sigia-l] Personas vs. Audience Analysis

[Dave]

Thomas,

Where did you the idea that personas are all about who they are as
opposed to what they do?

personas are supposed to be about goals and tasks. The "who" part is
just meant to aid in giving context to where the doing is taking place
and other relevant qualities of the doer and their wholistic
environment.

You can't ONLY concentrate on the doing. 
i.e shoveling
What am I shoveling, to what end, for whom, by whom, and in what environment.

All of those elements are important to the total final solution.

I just think you are mistaken as to why people are dong personas and
what they were really intended to describe.

And after reading the below there isn't all that much different
between what you do and the pieces of persona creation, except that
you don't turn your data into a model that can be easily shared and
consumed (related to) by the x-functional team.

-- dave

On 8/30/05, Thomas Quine <Thomas.Quine at lss.bc.ca> wrote:
> The problem I see with personas has been mentioned already - that the
> focus is on who the user is rather than what they do. This has limited
> value for usability analysis, because after all, usability is all about
> doing.
> 
> I approach all information design projects the same way, whether it's a
> website or a training course or a manual or an illustration. I focus on
> what the target audience wants to do, not who they are.
> 
> I start with task analysis to identify the "do" stuff. We prepare legal
> information, so for instance, one of the things we've learned from the
> questions we get asked is that some people want to obtain legal
> visitation rights to their grandchildren.
> 
> Who wants to do this? Ask a few questions, and you learn it's mostly
> grandmothers, rather than grandfathers, and you can segment the
> grandmothers into different categories - for instance, rural vs. urban.
> So one segment of our audience is elderly rural women (no kidding, this
> is one of my target audiences).
> 
> How can we help our audience do what it is they want to do? Now I do
> audience analysis, which consists of finding the answers to two
> questions:
> 
> 1. What is it about my audience that might play a factor in their
> ability to do what it is they want to do?
> 2. What is it about my audience that might play a factor in my choice of
> information product?
> 
> To the first question, you get answers like: Many are not terribly
> well-educated and mostly they have little legal knowledge. Many have
> below-average incomes, can't afford lawyers, and feel intimidated by the
> legal system. They are strongly motivated. And so on.
> 
> To the second question, you get answers like: This audience has limited
> access to high bandwidth and few have a computer in the home. They
> mostly speak English. They're not terribly Web-savvy and they may be
> near-sighted. They prefer to talk to people in person, etc. They mostly
> have telephone access but limited ability to travel, etc.
> 
> Funny thing I've learned is that when you start focusing on what people
> want to do, almost immediately your audience sorts itself into
> functional groups for whom it's easy to identify a suitable information
> product. Then the persona fairly jumps out at you.
> 
> - Thom
> 
> 
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-- 
David Heller
E: dheller (at) gmail (dot) com
W: www (dot) synapticburn (dot) com