The Asterisk* Reader Persona!

April 29, 2003 | 0 Comments

A short while back I asked for volunteers to help me with a persona experiment. The response was very good, I got 12 responses total which is more than enough for what I wanted, and I’d like to thank everyone who participated. Just to recap the goals behind this experiment were:

• Refine my default persona to something more useful
• To flesh out my process for creating personas
• Experiment with this process in an virtual arena
• Get a better idea who was reading my site
• Have a little fun

I’m happy to say it was a successful experiment. The process went off without a hitch and I got some really great responses and data that I could really use. I learned quite a bit about you guys, and turns out you’re all quite a bit like me. No big surprise there. One of the most eye opening things for me was where most of you live, I only had a few responses from the west coast, where I’m at. Only two from outside the US. It seems most of you are from the Mid West or there abouts. Texas is in the M’er F’n house y’all!

So, without further ado, here is my new Asterisk* Reader Persona, “David Lowe” (gif).

If you’ve seen my previous persona examples you’ll note I changed and added a few things. To start with, these are geared toward Asterisk* and blog reading. This was established in the questionaires that I used as well. Different site, different goals, different questions = different persona.

Speaking of goals, I’ve been really into goal directed design and development lately. I think that in general there are too many Web projects out there with no clear goal attached. These projects usually end up in massive frustration for everyone involved. One component to goal directed projects is the establishment of user (or in this case reader) goals. I thought it would be a good place to state them right there in the persona. I’ve started doing this with my personas at work and think it will work out very well.

Along the same vein are the “importance words”. The purpose of these is to highlight things important to users that don’t really translate into concrete goals. These can be anything, but they should represent the user and their goals, actions, likes and dislikes. Almost like design and goal keywords. This is just an idea I had and wanted to try out. I think they’ll prove helpful. If you can think of a better term for them or any ideas along those lines let me know.

And hey, if you have any questions or comments or anything about “David”, or anything else persona related, fire away. I’m still learning how best to use and create these things and would love any input, ideas, case studies or stories on your guys use with personas.

Filed under: IA and Usability