Re: Desktop personas (draft)

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 11:25 -0300, Santiago Roza wrote:
> at least from a marketing point of view, you can't ask me to "forget
> trying to cover my userbase"... that's suicidal; we'd be telling
> anecdotes, not segmenting anything.

You're still missing the point, I think.

The general idea is to cover the user base, but the idea of personas is
not to cover the userbase. If you think of a bell population, you have
80% within two standard deviations (I think?). Personas are a tool
whereby you attempt to design 'average' users that you think most people
are going to be pretty close to. By aiming at those personas, you're
trying to design something which is pretty good for most people.

It's attempting to recognise that the distribution of wants, needs and
skills across human populations isn't uniform - most people want roughly
the same thing, most people have roughly the same skills (for some
definition of roughly), and that there is some polarisation there too.
Personas attempt to cover a large range of people, but also includes a
weighting of what you think the most important issues are.

You can't make everyone happy all the time; personas is just a tool to
help figure out how to prioritise who to make happy when, if you see
what I mean.

Cheers,

Alex.