Personas are one of my favorite tools in the user experience tackle box. They can be used to drive the design of a project from start to finish, and also answer many pesky design problems. Adrienne Massanari (blog) pointed out another use for them at this years IA Summit in Memphis, political leverage. The following are my tweets from the session:
As she was working on a work flow diagram it occurred to her that she didn’t have a clue who the users were.
We are going to look at using Personas to tackle political issues inside an organization.
Discourse is the space in which carious objects emerge and are continuously transformed.
Discourse is powerful stuff, just as powerful as a language.
“Users are not monolithic or straight forward, but are complex and fragmented in nature..”
Theme 1: the ‘stupid user’ is a concept that is going away. Anyone who has done a usability test has felt this way though.
Not everyone wants to be a power user, and it makes sense to hide some advanced features to support the common user.
Theme 2: Users as victims of bad design. Nelson is seen as encouraging the view that users are simply victims.
If the user is a victim, then the designers can be viewed as teh heroes that swoop in to safe them.
Theme 3: Users as the co-designers. This is seen a lot in participatory design and users are seen as part of the overall system.
Personas and politics: Users are not good partners for coming up with design, better to have pretend users and design for them.
Good ole Eagle-Eye Edward from Cisco. He was a good desk topper for over a year at my old company.
Dan Saffer (@odannyboy) states that half of the personas that are out there are made up, and mostly just imaginary friends.
Personas are boundary objects, they encompass complex IA concept into a story.
PM’s and analysts can use personas as political leverage inside of their own organization.
IA/UCD uses users are resources to be mined, we flatten the difference between different people.
IA/UCD can also undervalue the users hands on knowledge and considers themselves the expert rather than the user.
IA/UCD already use users in the form of personas as political tools in their organization.
With personas we need to make sure we don’t mistake the map for the territory.
It is difficult for designers to be heroes because there is no tyrant to overthrow, no dragon to slay…
We can’t simply “understand users and then ignore them” — Robert Hoekman
The information Adrienne gave us did an excellent job of pointing out something that has always been there, but no one ever noticed. By showing us the variety of ways an organization can use a persona, it gives more strength to the agrument on why projects should take them time to develop them. It also adds another line of seperation between personas and market segments, though some can argue that market segments are used in the same manner.
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