[Sigia-l] Personas vs Business Needs?

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

How do you use personas? I don't mean how are you supposed to use them
(Cooper-style or whatever), but how do you *actually* use them in your
work, if at all?

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.

Personally, I use personas as a means of arriving at design directions.
They are necessarily vague, and journeys constructed using them are not
supposed to document the system's features. Usually, a brief explanation
of this is enough to keep a client from wanting the personas to answer
all the design questions, but sometimes it's not.

I'd be interested to hear whether others have hit real-world problems
around the use of personas on projects.

Jonathan




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