My point about personas being “fictional” was not that it was derogatory, just that you appear to fall into the familiar and unhelpful trap of arguing that personas are imaginary, to justify not using them. I don’t think that’s a good reason not to use them, but I do think there may be other reasons, and I’d like to hear those in more detail.

I would really like to read that next blog post about how you triangulate your validation process. Tell us more!

The process differs from Persona creation in that our whole process is concurrent, and we are validating all the time. We create both negative and positive hypothesis, which we constantly test. That would be another blog post.

Just like good believable fiction, that sets the imagination on fire, personas take time to develop. Finding the time is hard in an Agile environment like ours.

The advantage of not using Persona is that it becomes very easy to validate the research, and justify its value. This is because one can test the assumptions made. In our case everyone we used as a representative users, has gone on to use Webnographer. The next stage is to swap who we use as representative users, and then can test our assumptions again.

If one could truly full and real time data on user movements through your website. One could move beyond personas toward a true user driven design.

It’s also important to acquire a representative focus group for some live testing of user experience.

The process of developing personas helped us identify the commonalities between members of our target audiences and deemphasize the fluke data. The personas themselves served as an approachable, memorable representation of pages of transcripts, notes, and survey results.

Good post, thanks.

One big objection though – you keep saying that personas are fictional, as though we just make them up. This is a comment that we hear a lot from people who question the value of personas (often because they don’t want to pay for the work of creating them).

I would argue that personas are not fictional. When done right, they arise from a rigorous process of research and analysis, and they are authentic representations of real people. Which is a way of saying they may be “fictional” in the sense that they are not living, breathing people. But they are not imaginary. We don’t just make them up.

To my mind, there *is* a discussion to be had about the value of direct engagement with real people versus engagement with real people mediated by personas. But I don’t feel we can have that discussion seriously on the basis of a false distinction between “real” people and “fictional” personas.

Just my 2c worth, as ever.