Alec Cochrane — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 02:29:23 GMT

Interesting concept Andrea, whilst I think the sentiment is good, the application of this would only work in situations where there is no budget for user surveys to find out why people are visiting the “about us” page. Also nice use of integrating what little qualitative data there is at hand to manipulate the personas – I’d recommend this approach to someone who doesn’t have the research capabilitiies, time or budget to do the online surveys.

Although it does bring me on nicely to an approach we adopted recently. Whilst our research team went away and conducted online surveys and interviews to work up the personas, we also went into overdrive and used some previous research to come up with some user behaviours. We then cross referenced the behaviours with the personas to show how these ‘people’ were interacting with the site and how they were getting there. This helped give a bit of context to the Business who couldn’t quite work out how we were going to link a persona to the nitty gritty of x million users having various different touch points with the site.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Alec Cochrane