[Sigia-l] photos on personas?

[Andrew Boyd]

On 4/4/07, Stew Dean <stewdean at gmail.com> wrote:
> I recently had a situation where I was given some beautiful personas
> that someone had spent a couple of weeks creating but could not tell
> me who the key groups for the project where, what tasks they wanted to
> do (I agree with the need to link tasks with groups) and what their
> priority was in terms of the project.  As an IA this is the kind of
> thing I'm really after.  I prefer the idea of user requirements over
> personas myself.

Hi Stew,

I use personas mostly to validate and enunciate business requirements
rather than as a kind of replacement for them, and that is the way
they seem to work best here for other IAs that I work with.

Speaking of requirements - Personas support the BA process, as do
paper prototypes and early HTML mockups (like one might output from
Axure with big chunks of X placeholder boxes). I think that this is
one of the key ROI arguments for having IAs involved throughout the
whole development process - that we help the BAs. I know that this is
seen as a bit infra dig by "purity in design" fans, and perhaps a bit
condescending to BAs (i.e. it infers that they need our help), but
I've seen it work a lot.

In deference to the "Big D Designer" folks, I'd have to agree that all
artefacts are just that - artefacts, something we create, and we
should never confuse these "means to an end" with the end itself.

Cheers, Andrew