Strictly speaking, personas have nothing to do with usability testing. But personas can fill in as users when we're designing, and some teams recruit for studies using attributes of personas they've developed. Connection? I think so.
The Persona Modeler (earlier called "character creator") is a tool that I've been working with and refining for several years to help me define and understand users. I gave a talk about how it works at UPA Boston 2012. Here are the slides. Feel free to download!
Hi Dana, very interesting presentation.
ReplyDeleteWhat is your approach to discovering how many distinct personas there might be in any research data set?
This tool is less for forming personas than for checking that your team is taking into account all the types of users who are out there -- and looking at where the gaps are in what you know about your users (and personas).
DeleteHaving said that, if you were going to make personas out of this, I guess I would assign numbers to the attribute scales and then do a cluster analysis.
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