Beyond fake personas
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Angela Quail has written about assessing the validity of personas. To quote:
Robust Personas are personas we can stand behind with confidence. We have conducted stakeholder interviews, internal research interviews, general industry and domain research, ethnographic field research, and we have tried hard to shoot holes in what we have found. We have conducted as many in-person ethnographic interviews as possible in each target segment or sub-segment. We have identified patterns of thought or behavior only if we have seen them occur multiple times. We have sifted through existing quantitative and other qualitative research to confirm or refute what we have seen. And as we developed the personas, we asked refining questions with follow-up phone interviews. Our personas look and act like real customers, which we have confirmed through preliminary introductions to select customer-facing employees in customer service, support, and sales. We confidently deliver these personas to our client with few, if any disclaimers.
[Thanks to Steve Mulder.]
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 