Mark Dykeman — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:46:13 GMT

As a Web Analytics person, I’m all for using data as much as possible. I love the data.

But not in personas. Generally, there are two groups of people who should not make guesses about user motivations and needs: Clients and Web professionals. Clients are too embedded in their business and all too easily absorb the culture and organizational opinions about what their users need. Generally, unless they’ve been doing a lot of research, these opinions are just wrong. Web professionals shouldn’t guess about what non-professionals think about a site. We are *far* too embedded in our own culture and milieu to be able to guess what someone who does not use the web regularly thinks or wants. And we also develop institutional knowledge and biases of our own.

We always have to do research. And research does not have to be expensive. If you’re a little guy, find six people who you don’t know very well and ask them. Paper prototype, show them the site, go down to Starbucks and ask a stranger what they think. It won’t be statistically valid, but as anyone in the practice who has done research knows, you get good data from only a few people. Sampling more than ten is a waste of time.

Our training as professionals makes us great at coming up with solutions, but it makes us less able to understand the customer. Personas are there to represnt the customer: not a demographic, not a perfect model of a perfect customer. Web Analytics data answers “what,” not “why.” Personas are about the why.

Mark Dykeman — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:19:25 GMT

“In practice, I think it’s better to have the user goals determined before you start looking at web analytic data.” I couldn’t agree with you more. As an Analyst, I’m buggered (and not in the good way) without user and business goals.

Isn’t the real goal of personas to connect us folk with them folk – the users? And inspire – and I think that is the key word – visual designers, interactive designers and team members in general to do our very best job to meet the needs of real people. To that end, Personas can’t be ‘numbery’ – they have to drive empathy, sympathy and understanding. They can’t be segments, or demographic profiles

That’s the main reason I think you never read personas that start off “john q smith works at x-company and is a real bastard.” No one would ever care about meeting his needs.

Note: Robert Williams is right that the analytics data can be a very good source of hypotheses. It’s one of the best sources of hypotheses. But then you’ve got to go out and test them, which circularly takes you back to qualitative material.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Mark Dykeman