[Design] how to write personas?

[Michal Migurski]

On Sep 16, 2011, at 11:32 AM, Matt Amos wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Michal Migurski <mike at stamen.com> wrote:
>> I thought it was quite appropriate. The key is that it's a believable picture with a name attached, and focused on that person's needs and goals. So maybe something that focuses on Norman's on background and ends with his visit to the site. The design process picks it up from there - why did Norman come to osm.org, what does he want, and how to do we help him along with the other dozen or so hypothetical people we've identified?
> 
> the persona "story" ends with them visiting the site? does that mean
> there are separate personas for Norman, who is interested in joining,
> and Carol, who is just coming to find out what OSM is about? is the
> presumption that if both Carol and Norman are satisfied that Carol
> could turn into Norman (i'll leave that to your imagination...) if she
> decides she likes what she sees?

I think yeah, if it's useful to think about those people as two distinct audiences with different needs. Carol might be a journalist, for example (Richard included this idea on the wiki), and while she could eventually get involved with the project directly, the aim of the persona is to describe how a member of the press learns about OSM and what we want them to learn.

I asked Peter Merholz at Adaptive Path to share some of their work, and he sent along this non-confidential document they created for Microsoft a number of years ago:
	http://studio.stamen.com/open/adaptivepath_for_microsoft_personas.pdf

The personas start on page 26, and a pattern I'm seeing here is that they don't actually detail the interactions these folks have with Microsoft's products, but they do detail motivations, behaviors, and worries for each.

-mike.

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