Getting Started With Personas

Here is the latest information about Robert Barlow-Busch’s full-day persona design workshop:

Getting Started With Personas

Thursday, June 8, 2006
9:00am to 5:00pm
Durham, North Carolina
Hilton Raleigh-Durham Airport Hotel

Chances are good you’ve heard something about “personas” recently, as
they’ve become a hot topic in design, usability, documentation, and
marketing. But finding concrete, comprehensive information on how to
create and use personas can be difficult. In this workshop, you’ll
get a hands-on introduction to personas that demystifies the process
and explains how to use them in the design and documentation of
websites, web applications, and software.

Taught by Robert Barlow-Busch, Practice Director of Interaction
Design at Quarry Integrated Communications. Look for an invited
chapter by Robert in “The Persona Lifecycle”, the first authoritative
book about personas, published earlier this month. Workshop
participants will receive a free copy of the book.

To learn more, visit:

http://personas.mollyguard.com/

Personas by Robert Barlow-Busch

Forwarded from Lourdes Cueva Chacón:

Come join a discussion that explores the benefits and unpacks the mystery behind personas. Personas are a type of user profile that has emerged as a best practice in web and software design, but about which little concrete information is available. What exactly is a persona? When are they useful, and when are they not? How do you create them? Specifically, how do you make sure they’re representative of actual users, and not just an exercise in creative writing? And once you have personas, what can you actually do with them? Robert Barlow-Busch from Quarry Integrated Communications will answer these questions by sharing experiences from a variety of client projects conducted over the past 5 years.

This talk will be a special presentation for TriUPA and IxDA members and friends since Robert is giving a full-day persona design workshop on June 8th. (Read more details in our next post).

In advance of this event, you can read about one of the case studies Robert will discuss and download some example personas from Quarry’s website (examples).

About Quarry and the presenter:
Robert is the Practice Director of Interaction Design at Quarry Integrated Communications, a marketing and design agency. Although its Interaction Design and Usability group is based in Waterloo, Ontario, Quarry has just relocated its US headquarters to Durham and looks forward to building some ties with the professional community in RTP. Robert and Quarry are long-time members of the UPA and frequent presenters at the annual conference and at chapter meetings, speaking on topics such as the basics of usability testing, personas, and how marketing and usability could work more closely together (yes, it’s true: they can!).

Robert has about 15 years experience across a variety of industries in Canada, the US, and Europe. After a particularly frustrating client meeting in 2001, in which nobody could agree who the customer was, Robert introduced personas to Quarry’s design process. The team’s work since then caught the attention of Forrester Research, who has identified Quarry as source of expertise in their report Where to Get Help With Persona Projects. Also, look for an invited chapter by Robert in The Persona Lifecycle, the first book to give an in-depth look at the practice of personas.

When: Wednesday, June 7th at 6:00pm

Where:
Lulu Press Inc
800 Aviation Pkwy
Suite 300
Morrisville, NC 27560

Map to Event

Starting with this event, the coordinators are recommending places for participants to meet before and after the event. Before, in case you need to have some food in order to survive such a long day, and after, in case you want to keep chatting on the topic or just have a drink with your TriUPA fellows. So here our recommendations:

Before event: (Map to) Village Deli Morrisville, just 2 blocks from Lulu. Feel free to bring your food to Lulu.
After hours venue: (Map to) El Meson Mexican Restaurant

Computing the Future: Release 2016

Daniel A. Reed, a world-renowned authority on high-performance computing, will offer a glimpse of 2016 and the wonders (and annoyances) that new technologies are likely to bring over the next decade in a presentation Tuesday, May 30, on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

Computing the Future: Release 2016

Trip report: CHI 2006

I attended CHI 2006 in Montreal from April 24 – 27. CHI is the major conference for HCI research (in the broadest sense, ranging from input and interaction techniques to field studies of complex work situations). It also attracts a large community of practitioners, particularly from the major software and hardware companies. Attendance was estimated at 2,400+, which is up significantly from the past few years, implying a relatively robust tech industry, along with growing interest in HCI and UX. Recruiting was notably robust. Microsoft had so many job postings they needed a 3-ring binder to hold them all. Google, Yahoo, eBay and SAP also had large recruiting presences.

Some thoughts from the sessions I attended:

The Route to the Sea for User Value
This panel, with managers from Oracle, Intuit, World Savings Bank, and Sony/Ericsson, addressed the perennial challenge of integrating effective UX work into product development processes. Jeremy Ashley (Oracle) argued strongly that “we [UX professionals] have to have influence”–we must work with and persuade complementary groups (such as documentation and performance engineering) of UX’s importance. More broadly, we must assume accountability for UX, “no matter what.” Blaming other groups for not accepting the UX perspective is self-defeating. Perhaps the best approach, said Janice Rohn (World Savings Bank), is to “start in the boardroom” by understanding executives’ goals.

The challenge is that while “nobody in the corporate world says usability isn’t important, they don’t understand what it entails.” The range and depth of work required to create great user experiences is still widely unappreciated. UX practitioners need to build relationships with engineering and product development executives to help bridge this gap. Ultimately, the goal is to make UX practices ubiquitous, so that “it’s not just UX saying it’s important to improve the navigation, it’s the business saying it’s important to improve the navigation.” Until we reach that product-development utopia, said Lisa Anderson (Intuit) it’s critical to “follow through on your passions.” Don’t give up on what you believe is right for users, despite the obstacles.

Human-Information Interaction
This panel addressed the provocative question of whether studying human information interaction (AKA behavior) should be separate from (but complementary to) HCI. Peter Pirolli and Stu Card made strong arguments for focusing on deeper theoretical issues such as what information structures best support people’s cognitive functions, and how to represent information in large “information landscapes.” Research needs to address these fundamental issues instead of just developing and testing new types of interfaces or interaction styles. (So, if anything, HCI should be a subset of HII).

Tagging
An example of HII research might be tagging and social bookmarking practices. A large panel featuring Josh Schacter of del.icio.us and George Furnas of Michigan debated the purposes and uses of tags. Definitions of “tag” included: “annotations,” “loose associations,” “rich ways of linking disparate objects” and “nicknames for groups of things.” While many interesting ideas were proposed (including the idea that tags are the harbinger of widespread growth of communities around metadata), I had the sense that our understanding of how tags are used is still limited. Discussion focused on recall (AKA refindability) and “distribution” (social sharing of tagged information). But answers are missing to the broad questions, What are tags used for? and Are tagging systems effective? So, developing a deep understanding of tagging practices and what underlying information problems these practices are addressing could be a significant contribution to “HII.” This contribution, in turn, would support the develop of new interfaces for the creation and use of tags.

Some recommended readings:

• Paul Dourish, Implications for Design. Easily the most-discussed paper at CHI. Dourish argues that “ethnographic” HCI research has become impoverished by an analytical/methodological stance that treats ethnographic data simply as an input to requirements definition. Required reading for anyone interested in field-based/contextual approaches in HCI and UX.
• MS Research, Fast, Flexible Filtering with Phlat – Personal Search and Organization Made Easy. MSR team continues to improve and evalute desktop search.
• MS Research, FaThumb: A Facet-based Interface for Mobile Search. Very nice mobile search UI from another MSR team.

–Abe