[Design] how to write personas?

Matt Amos zerebubuth at gmail.com
Fri Sep 16 18:55:05 BST 2011


nice work, everyone, on getting started with the personas (personae?
antennas? antennae?) [1]. special thanks to gregory - i know it's
really hard to keep good notes of these kinds of discussions. i had a
go at writing a persona on the plane back from SOTM and this is what i
came up with:

Norman:
Norman is an extreme ironing enthusiast and sees a mention of OSM in
his favourite extreme ironing blog. He thinks this is an interesting
idea, and follows the link to http://www.osm.org/. He finds
well-written and prominent information about the goals and values of
the project, and understands that there is a community. Wanting to
engage further with the community, he finds information about mappers
and events in his local area. Searching further, he is able to find
information about other extreme ironing enthusiasts who are already
members of the OSM community. Norman decides that this is very
exciting, and wants to become part of the community. He is easily able
to find the "sign up" process and understands all the steps involved.

comparing this to what's on the wiki makes me wonder whether i'm Doing
It Wrong - should personas be short, bullet-point-like, or is it more
helpful from a design point of view to have (perhaps more of) these
prose-y, narrative descriptions?

cheers,

matt

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Design_Mailing_List/OSM.org_Personas



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