Comments on Extending a Technique: Group Personas

Allison Walker — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:44:56 GMT

Great article. Thanks.

Kim Goodwin — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:44:04 GMT

Mike, thanks for an interesting article. While we don’t exactly advocate “group personas” at Cooper, we have sometimes found small groups of personas helpful. For example, when designing a handheld device for a museum, we realized that the device would be used by more than one person at a time—-a couple on a date, a group of friends out for an afternoon, or parents and children. While it’s still useful to think of the people in those groups as individual personas, it’s also critical to consider their interactions with one another as they use the device.

Mike Kuniavsky — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:06 GMT

I agree that this is like the kinds of work that some marketing researchers do. Certainly the technique is probably not unlike what they do, but neither is the original persona technique, for that matter. In fact, I believe that what a lot of user reseachers do is what marketing researchers should have been doing all along, so the fields are not all that different. The important difference for me, however, is the place in the lifecycle that this comes in. This is going to make some marketing people angry, but in my experience marketing research is primarily concerned with finding an appropriate group of people for a given solution, whereas user research is about finding an appropriate solution for a given group of people. I think that’s an important inversion of priorities and this technique is designed specifically to address the latter problem.

As to whether this is too complex to effectively promote UX, I can’t say. I believe that UX deliverables are products, too, and to be successful need to meet the needs of their users, who often happened to be company executives. What effectively communicates the value of a good user experience will depend on the audience, so how it’s presented (whether in the form of rogorous ROI, or just a session where the CEO gets to see how much of a difference a usable version of their products makes) will depend on the needs of the users.

nemrut — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:06 GMT

This is all fine and well and a very good effort but how is this different from traditional market research?

Other than elaborating on specific consumer behaviour, you’re essentially repeating what traditional mkt researchers accomplish and relabeling it as ‘group personas.’

I’m not disparaging the work nor diminishing the importance of this approach. However, I’m getng the distint impression from the number of articles being published recently by UX practitioners that somehow ground-breaking methods are being developed.

Maybe it’s the need for recognition, promoting one’s company or in fact, just simply goodwill. Either way I think the UX community needs to step back and look at ways to *simplify* and develop more flexible approaches. It also needs to do a better job in communicating value of work products and ROI.

The last thing we need is more complexity or work products that confuse our real added value to the greater business community.