[Sigia-l] From Research to IA

[Donna Fritzsche]

>
>Someone on the list mentioned persona. While these are certainly useful, I
>have found them to be weak candidates if you only have time to do one thing
>during data analysis. They are good for communicating insights, but leave
>the team with yet another translation job: "here are the persona, great; how
>should that make a difference in the design?" At their worst, persona are
>works of pure speculation. At their best they do a good job of presenting a
>synthesis of insights about people. In my experience they are terrible
>vehicles for *generating* that synthesis. And, in my experience, they are
>poor vehicles for describing insights about patterns of behavior,
>relationships, and context.

Hi Marc,
Actually, you are correct, persona are best used in conjunction with 
more tools.  For instance, you can go from a day in the life (or hour 
in the life of , etc, depending on your situation) to the equivalent 
of what you call an insight - implication-solution table.  I have 
used this in the design of web-apps and found it to be very useful. 
Thanks for posting your other findings!  They look very interesting.

Donna