[Sigia-l] photos on personas?

[Jay Morgan]

Eric,

We use silhouettes for the personas we just built.  The usual rules are:
must have a face, a name, a location, an age...  We found that our users
segmented by their goals and approach to usage, which transcend
demographics.  We went with task mind-set personas rather than
demographics.  (Borrowing the term task mind-set from a reference in Pruitt
& Adlin's "The Persona Lifecycle".) 

Silhouettes are more abstract than cartopons, even, so we don't have to
worry about faces at all.  Our stakeholders already have strong demographic
segmentation, so we wanted to avoid potential connections between task-based
personas and those existing demographic models.  Some of the personas also
have props with them to suggest their characteristics. 

We made the silhouettes in gray-scale and color.  We have image files for
each silhouette that we use to 'tag' parts of our documentation that are
relevant to that persona.

Hope this helps,
Jay

A bit of any etymology on "cartopon":
carto-  from cartoon + p for painted + on:  reduced from cartoons painted
on, which reflects their likeness to being painted onto photographed
images.  You'll notice the Flickr images identify this quality quite well. 
The practice of crafting cartopons has been enhanced by high-fidelity
illustration programs from companies like Adobe.  It is being made popular
by game culture, where the avatar is more common than the character, since
avatars are more easily identified with yet more finite than a character. 

On 3/27/07, Eric Scheid <eric.scheid at ironclad.net.au> wrote:
If personas are called for in a project, what sort of photo do you use to
e.

-- 
Jay Morgan
Applied cognitive scientist practicing information architecture, interaction
design, and corporate culture manipulation and the occasional hoax