Making Personas More Powerful

By leelefever on October 17, 2004 - 2:27pm.

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• Online Usability
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Reach Customers Online pointed me to George Olsen's article on Boxes and Arrows: Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design. It's a comprehensive look at developing and using personas- and fills in gaps left by the father of personas: Alan Cooper.

I've posted before about a project I'm working on that is using Contextual Inquiry (ethnography) as a way to build a usable distributed learning resource. As part of this process we've created personas that represent our archetypal users.

Just a few days ago, we got our personas laminated -- a final step to give them a more permanent and formal feel. The team is growing and we're working through feature specifications, so the personas are on our mind a lot. The article above was a great refresher for this phase of the project.

See also by George Olsen: Persona Creation and Usage Toolkit (18 page .pdf)