| The
Making of Great Products – The importance of persona profiling |
Now and then, we come across a product or service that comes into
an already-crowded marketplace and yet manages to establish itself
as the new standard in its market. Some examples of these innovators
are Google (which managed to penetrate through the crowded search
engine space with its search technology that beat the rest of the
competition) and MySpace (which picked up the lessons learnt from
earlier social network sites and corrected the mistakes/effectively
addressed the pain-points).
There are two key methods that smart companies use to create winning
products in mature markets. First, they understand their target
market and where the current products fall short. This is done by
bringing in personas in your design decisions.
Some of the things that you certainly need to look at are:
• Persona is about real people that you would meet, talk
with and observe
• Don’t start with a method or methodology and keep
it intuitive
• Persona is all about role-play and getting in to their skins
• Base it on first-hand user knowledge and primary experience
In effect, persona profiling is not about market segmentation,
customer profiling or workflow analysis. Neither do they fit preconceptions,
use-cases or demographic models, because reality is often times
more difficult that what we think. Personas aren’t supposed
to make us feel comfortable about our design decisions; in fact,
they should do just the opposite and can keep us honest.
Related links
The
role and evolution of design in Software Products
Persona
Creation - Beyond Fake Personas
Is User experience relevant where you work?
Is
everything on the menu good?
Persona
Creation - Nice Persona, but is it useful?
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| Product
Globalization Webinar |
“Product
Globalization – Is it about Products or Business?"
Date:
26 June, 2008 Time:
11.00 am PT | 2.00 pm ET
Presenters
Janaki Jayachandran
Delivery Manager, Aspire Systems
Claire Adams
Head of Projects, Applied Language Solutions
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