Re: Desktop personas (draft)

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 22:44 +0100, Marcus Bauer wrote:
> there are three groups of desktop personas:
> 
>   1. private
>   2. business
>   3. public sector

I'm going to make a quick comment about personas before people go too
far in this direction - if you follow Cooper (and I'm not exactly sure
how personas are supposed to apply to marketing), you're not trying to
define a target audience per se. What you're doing is actual
characterisation, as a novelist might do: dreaming up some example users
in some actual detail. The goal isn't to cover our audience 100%, but
come up with a 80% or so coverage.

As an example, instead of 1.1 Youngster (which is quite a general
description), you would have:

        1.1 Joe Evans  [you should name the persona]
        
        Joe is 17 years old, and is attending high school. He uses his
        PC to do homework - writing up science experiments in
        OpenOffice.org, doing research on the web with Firefox. He has a
        Livejournal and uses his AOL instant messenger account with gaim
        to talk to his friends.
        
        He has a k750i camera phone which can also play a small number
        MP3s. He has a small collection of CDs and DVDs for
        entertainment, and occasionally plays games on his playstation.
        He also enjoys watching sports on TV and plays soccer every
        Saturday afternoon.

Now, the above example obviously means this persona doesn't cover voip,
the 17yo using their computer as a home studio, or any of the other
myriad different users there might be. That's not the point of a
persona: they're basically characters. The way you use them is along the
lines of "being able to enter maths equations really easily would help
Joe with his homework", that kind of thing. 

Cooper usually says that five or so persona are more than enough: they
should be pretty distinct. "Inmates..." also only gives a really brief
overview of what they are and how they're used: to be honest, they seem
mostly a kind of logic razor to me, cutting out inconsequential rubbish
- stopping people focusing on corner cases and other arcania, and making
them think about the big picture. It also prevents design-by-committee.

A lot of what Marcus wrote down was tasks to do with media manipulation
- the image manipulation program described by "Inmates.." is gold, and
well worth the read.

I would be happy to help contribute to some personas if people think
it's worth doing.

Cheers,

Alex.