[Sigia-l] Personas vs Business Needs?

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org 
> [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Switzky, Andrew
> Sent: 19 July 2006 14:34
> To: SIGIA-L
> Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] Personas vs Business Needs?
> 
> Jonathan Baker-Bates wrote:
> 
> "The reason I ask is that I'm having an interesting time 
> making sure that the personas I'm constructing as part of a 
> large discovery phase correspond to the client's business 
> needs. This process is taking me further than I'd like to 
> from what my user research is telling me, and I'm worried 
> that the value of the whole exercise will degenerate into 
> selectively justifying foregone conclusions."
> 
> Hi Jonathon,
> 
> Is it that you are finding that the personas contradict the 
> client's business needs? Is your user research suggesting 
> that customer's will not behave as the business believes that 
> they will? 

Essentially, yes. For example, while the user testing revealed a clear
persona that's also very common from a usage point of view, it's hard to
give this persona a business justification because they are not seen as
having high enough (monetary) value.

Logically, I suppose I should therefore discount that persona from the
model, and design instead for the one that aligns better to the needs of
the business. But I naturally feel uncomfortable with that. I also feel
that my theoretical understanding of persona usage is lacking - so feel
free to tell me to go away and just study that for the answer!

Jonathan


_____________________________________________________________________
This e-mail has been scanned for viruses by MessageLabs.