[Sigia-l] Personas vs. Audience Analysis

[Peter Merholz]

Thomas Quine started the thread with:
> 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.

As others have mentioned, those are poorly constructed personas. If  
you read ABOUT FACE 2.0, where Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann go into  
startling detail about persona creation, you'll see that the focus is  
on behavior. And that the only meaningful distinction between  
personas is how they behave.

On a recent project I borrowed from them their behavior analysis  
tool, which sets up various behavior traits along a spectrum. You  
then "plot" the users you observed along those spectra. And then you  
see how those users clump together. And if you get users who clump  
together again and again, you can develop a persona based on that.

So, for this project, where I was studying how people remember the  
important events and occasions in theirs and their friends and  
family's lives, I had behavioral qualities such as:

Self-Organization: low <-------------------------------------->high
Organizing others: low <-------------------------------------->high

Planning: day of <--------------------------------------> well in  
advance
Available time: constrained <-----------------------------------> free

Sharing photos:  rare <--------------------------------------->frequent

etc. etc.

I found this mini-method to be quite helpful in sifting through the  
user data I gathered.

--peter