Computers in Libraries -- Personas Keynote

First of all, if you ever go to a conference and you get a chance to listen to Stephen Abram speak, take it. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars. He's a thoughtful, articulate, and funny speaker. You can read a selection of his articles and presentations at http://www.sirsi.com/Resources/abram_articles.html .

He was participating in the keynote on Friday morning along with Mary Lee Kennedy, Executive Director of the Harvard Business School Library.

The discussion was on the use of "personas" to study how people both use resources in instutions and spread knowledge amongst themselves. Instead of looking at usability in general ("We've been doing usability for years and it isn't working" -- Stephen Abram) personas look at personality types who work within the institution (or corpration, or group of people) and then tries to develop the resources of the instituions to serve those personas.

Of course, personas can't be developed without doing scads of resource about the people within an institution and the way information circulates. I asked Mary Lee Kennedy afterwards: if you're spending so much money on doing a study of an institution to figure out what personas are using its resources, when do you know that it's time to reassess the personas? I mean, if you're developing a set of resources for a "fred" persona, and the zeitgeist of your institution tanked Fred months ago in favor of Ethel, how do you know?

Mary Lee Kennedy explained that you could redo the persona research as a catalyst for change or in response to change. If, for example, the company was going to undertake a change of direction, perhaps it would be time to reevaluate the personas as the goal of the entire company shifted. On the other hand, more prosaic reasons for reevaluating personas might include passage of time or a certain percentage of employee turnover. I would guess it would take some time to refine the specific benchmarks you would use.

The idea of getting an idea of how personas use your resources and developing them based on that feedback seems much more organic to me than the idea of usability. I wonder however if this kind of approach is possible when you only have some of the data. Take ResearchBuzz, for example. I could learn that Fred visits my site via an RSS feed, and that he clicks and average of 3 items per session. But I know nothing else about Fred; his age, his education level, his job, his interest. Furthermore even if I got that information (and frankly I'd have privacy concerns about asking for it) there is more I could not know -- I couldn't know how Fred distributed the information to other people, or what problem he was trying to solve, or how he found out about ResearchBuzz in the first place.

Can the idea of personas be used for Web sites when the Web site developer only has a fraction of the user information available, and so much of what seems to be necessary takes place outside the Web site?

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