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Grounding Your Work's Usability

Jared Spool: Three Important Benefits of Personas.  Here's a valuable essay on the successful use of personas (made-up users or virtualized stakeholders of any sort) to provide a reality perspective for the design of a system.  This is a companion to Alan Cooper's injunction to design systems for one user.  Although this approach shows up more in the context of interaction design and user-interface development, it strikes me that it is meaningful for the entire system-development life cycle and for the cycle of improvement that is envisioned for a product progression.

The single most-important takeaway that I recommend from this Scoble-Linked James Robertson find is that the successful introduction of a persona is a way to take the designer out of their world and into the world of the user.  One limitation of open-source development is the degree to which it has developers developing for themselves.  That works great when the user community consists of other like-minded developers.  It doesn't turn out so well when it is offered to a broader population of users with other purposes and perspectives.  The gap is often characterized as an absence of documentation.  I think it goes far deeper than that, back to whether the software is even designed to be documentable and reliably usable and by whom.

posted by orcmid at 12/12/2004 01:00:29 PM, rating data by NewsGator Online