Removing documentation from Personas
It is my quest and declared goal to remove as much documentation as possible when using personas and scenarios. Something is missing in agile development, and I believe the two UCD methods have much the missing in them that traditional agile development can learn from.
The developers shouldn’t be bothered with piles of documentation – neither should the project manager or the general management. If a group of people are appointed to creating the persona data as well as promoting the data, there is much to gain for the above mentioned groups of people (developers and management).
The developers and management shouldn’t need to read anything in order to understand and engage in the personas. The process should be as lean as possible. Tools for spreading the word include:
- Using real people. Introduce the personas with real people, who are actual persons who fit the persona descriptions. If the developers and project managers have a real person in their mind, it is much easier to take the use of personas serious.
- Making video personas. Watching real people makes engaging much easier.
- Posters, T-shirts, hand-outs. If the developers and project managers are constantly reminded about details (new and old) of the personas in a short and comprehendable form, they will not have to read loads of documents. This proves to be easier to engage in as well, as it can be hard to take a text-only-description serious.
- Emails from the personas. Create occational fictional e-mails from each persona, to make the impression that they are actually real – that the personas are real-life persons. Let the developers and project managers write back to the e-mails to ask questions. Either the e-mail can be answered by the persona-responsible person or forwarded to an actual person that fits the persona description.
- Collect real user stories. Whenever you hear a real-life user story, jot it down that piece of paper/notebook you always keep with you. Use theese user stories from the real life for arguments about features. You can even let one persona speak it? Real life user stories are always much better than fictional ones from the fictional personas.