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Subject:Re: Are you using personas? From:Peblb -at- aol -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 31 Jan 2003 00:27:38 EST
I don't think everyone has grasped the proper purpose of persona's, at least
not in the Cooper 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum' sense. Personas are a
tool used in Interaction Design. Interaction Design is a method of designing
IT type products (software utilities, PDAs, web sites) to be more suited to
the product's target audience. Persona's are not primarily meant to assist
technical writers in writing manuals.
However (and this is what gets my juices flowing) there's not a lot of
interaction designers out there, but if Cooper's right, then a lot of
companies need them. How do you find interaction designers? Cooper says
companies should look to their technical writers and make their own, because
the most important quality needed in interaction designers is a very strong
focus on user needs, which us lot have in abundance.
What I'm trying to do in my own job is to remain a technical writer but also
become an interaction designer. There would be many advantages if I can
achieve this:
1) I'd be involved in the product design process (which I'd find very
interesting)
2) I'd have a better understanding of the end users and the products (very
useful for writing the owner's manual)
3) I'd have an extra string to my bow (great for the CV)
4) I might get paid more!!
Philip
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