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2005-10-25The Distraction of User Personas?Orcmid's Lair: What Programmers Do. In the midst of struggling with some material on the gap between the world of computers and the situations in which they are employed, I played one of my cards on the themes of “What Computers Know” and “What Programmers Know.” I was inspired by a simple exercise from Eric Gunnerson. I overpowered that exercise, far beyond what the exercise situation called for, as a way to illustrate some of the concepts I’ve been teasing out in my plodding investigations. The Risk of Too Much InformationI also pointed out that there’s too much information in a restatement I offered as an improvement:
The mention of social-security numbers can be distracting and may lead to misunderstanding of what the essential requirement is (having to do with verifying the format, not the presence of a genuine social-security number). How Much Persona is Too Much Persona?My buddy Bill Anderson riffed on the prospect of providing too much information. He ties it to the possibly-erroneous use of personas in software requirements:
I don’t know what to make of this. I thought specifying personal traits gave developers a way to recognize and relate to the persona as an individual that the team creates a shared acquaintance of. I’m unclear that this is an error that would mislead the developers into possibly misunderstanding a requirement. Meanwhile, I’ve been creating a persona or two as a way for me to focus on a project of mine. I’ve already seen that being creative in persona invention can be a distraction, and I’ve been stuck. I have assumed that was a consequence of my working alone, with no team to brainstorm with. So how much should one personify the personas as a way of relating to them and creating a point-of-view that expresses their concerns, standing outside of the development process and looking inward? What About Developer Personas?I have another question too. Because of the nature of the project, I am wondering about having a persona for myself as well. It reflects my interest in understanding how the development lifecycle is a dance between both producers and adopters. Is it appropriate to represent the developer perspective with an identified persona? Dennis, this is an important question. Regardless of what Alan Cooper writes, I think that what the developers need to understand are the work practices and the context of that work. The very successful CLASS project (I need to put a link here) that we both worked on focused on the work, not on the individuals. We established very good relations with the users as a result of choosing Participatory Design as our own work practice. The system was not designed for a specific person, but to support the development of a new library work practice of digital reformatting of brittle books. So I think that the personas you've created for your ODMA work contain a good deal of information and detail that are irrelevant for software design purposes. The details may help with context, but even there, information about the family history of a user doesn't seem relevant.
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