Personas are Taxidermy
It’s been nearly a decade since Alan Cooper first published The Inmates Are Running the Asylum – a great book stating the obvious: software developers are rarely the people software is developed for.
In it Cooper promotes the use of archetypical descriptions of people, Personas, to keep the software development team focused on the customer.
That was 10 years ago.
This was before Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Amazon reviews, Wordpress.com. Before so many people began publishing their experiences, wants, desires, and honest feelings online publicly.
Today, we don’t need to make up people (even if they’re a composite of real), real ones are easy to find. For example, H&R Block is on Twitter currently with 346 followers.
Not frozen urban beasts – living, breathing, complex people with continually updating timelines.
People. That use software.
Here’s an example:
Can’t make this up.
2 Comments
Sam isn’t a real person. He’s a web developer. I guess things have come full circle.
Tapping into Twitter users and bloggers makes sense, but anyone who relies solely on feedback from sources like that will miss out on 95% of the real world users of most consumer sites today. The most technical and vocal aren’t always the most important.
Ed, the company Sam’s referring to is a technology company with lots and lots of web developers as customers.
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