User Interface Engineering

One of the big struggles teams have is creating a long-term adoption of their target personas. While personas are often accepted initially, it’s hard for the team to keep them “alive” for the entire project duration. Our research has shown those teams which manage to keep them alive are more likely to produce more usable designs, so we’re always interested in new techniques.

That’s why I perked up at the recent CHI Conference in Montreal when Yahoo!’s Aviva Rosenstein, Manager of Design Research for the Yahoo Media Group, shared her thoughts on getting development teams to adopt personas into their process.

Aviva talked about a recent project, where she had a laminated 3-fold card made up to describe the key attributes of the six personas the team was using.

Click here to see a larger rendition of the Yahoo 3-fold Persona card. (Details are obscured to protect proprietary info.)

Aviva described a “party” she threw, where she invited all of the team members to introduce them to the personas. Instead of a regular presentation, she gave each team member the 3-fold card and placed a sticker on their back containing the name of one of the persona identities. The team then played a game of having to guess their new identity by asking yes-or-no questions to other team members. The idea was to find someone else in the room with the same identity as they had.

Aviva said it was a real treat to watch all the team members as they studied their laminated cheat-sheets and asked each other pertinent questions.

The result? Aviva said she was pleased to find the team continuing to use the personas. It was not uncommon to see them bring their laminated cards to meetings and refer to them throughout the process.

A scene from a Yahoo! team meeting. Note the persona on the whiteboard and the 3-fold cards on the table.

What have you done to keep personas alive with your development teams?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under Team Management . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.