Martin White schrijft:

Just occasionally I have a ‘Eureka’ moment. At the end of last year, and quite serendipitously, I came across the concept of personas in an excellent paper by Alison Head in Online magazine. Since then I have been using the approach in intranet projects with a high degree of success. So what is a persona? It is a real virtual user! The person described in the persona does not actually exist but is created through research to typify some of the characteristics of a group of users. Biographical details are developed, even down to a photograph, so that the person concerned is so real that the intranet team start to identify with them as individual members of staff of the organization. One of the best summaries on persona development appears on James Robertson’s Step Two site, authored by Tina Calabria. However one of the problems I have faced is selling the idea to sceptical managers. The problem is now somewhat easier as today I came across a paper from Microsoft that is probably the most readable and balanced article on personas that I have come across. The authors, John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin, do discuss the limitations of the technique as well as the strengths, and there is a good bibliography. Complementing the Microsoft paper is another very practical paper from George Olsen entitled a Persona Creation and Usage Toolkit. The level of detail in this paper is very high, and taken together with the Microsoft paper, and the papers from Tina Calabria and Alison Head will provide an excellent starter kit for any one interested in using this very powerful user-centric design methodology.

[Bron: Intranet Focus Ltd]N.B. Getipt door Column Two