[Sigia-l] Rant about bad IA practice.

[Dan Saffer]

On Oct 26, 2006, at 8:36 AM, Stewart Dean wrote:

> 'User Profiles'.
>
> This is jack, he's 22 and he drives a Ford.  Great - so there is a  
> real user  called jack?  Apparently not.  The problem with may  
> profiles I have seen is they have nothing to do with the real  
> information.  They are marketing profiles full of assumptions and  
> prejudice and therefore useless in the pragmatic world of building  
> a web site.
>

This is because most people do personas wrong, basing them off bad  
marketing/demographic data or out of their own imaginations. Done  
well, they are derived almost entirely from research and are based on  
common behaviors and traits, not on common demographics or the  
designer's fertile imagination.

I wrote my own rant about this last year, called Persona Non Grata:

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000524.php




Dan Saffer
book http://www.designingforinteraction.com
work http://www.adaptivepath.com
site   http://www.odannyboy.com