Getting persona-l 2 December, 2003
Our Market Researcher and I have just had a really productive persona session. This morning we produced 3 initial persona sketches: Kris – the first year; Rachel – the third year; and Hung the international student. We’re using the Amazon/Microsoft method and I like it. It’s fast, easy to follow and most importantly collaborative. I’ve tried to use the Cooper method in other projects by following what little is publically known about it, but it’s not well documented and is very time consuming.
With the Amazon/Microsoft method you gather secondary data about your target markets/customers/users, brainstorm your assumptions and then build outline, or sketch, personas from the results. Using assumption data e.g. ’students are time poor’ sounds dangerous, but you can verify it using the hard data or in subsequent interviews. And making the assumptions explicit in this way means everyone is aware of them.
Having the sketch personas available early on allows you to ‘test’ and refine them in interviews with users and can provide some additional structure for your data collection, e.g. does living at home affect the student’s learning experience and if so how? It’ll be interesting to see what happens during their lifecycle. Perhaps I’m getting too personal (grin).