Michael Stephens writes about Internet Librarian 2006 and a talk by Stephen Abram:
Another engaging moment came during Stephen Abram's talk on the Personas project from SirsiDynix (where he has the coolest title ever: VP of Innovation). By analyzing data and building "characters" based on typical library users, we can better plan our services and programs. "Discovery Dan, Haley High School, Mommy Marcie, Rick Researcher, Senior Sally, and Tasha Learner" are all personas that probably find their way into your buildings. Are we meeting their needs? I appreciate this most of all because it goes way beyond the "We had 1000 people pass through the door" statistics to give us qualitative "stories" of our users: the busy mom, the browsing-the-shelves explorer, and many others.
I had the good fortune to see and to share a podium with Michael and Stephen at the MCLS Technology Leadership Institute (Rochester, NY). I've been working on some personas of my own to support some site design, and ran across these good resources to help you think of your own:
Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites - 2003 Information Today article by Alison Head.
Perfecting Your Personas - 2001 Cooper Interaction Design newsletter article by Kim Goodwin.
The Persona Lifecycle - 2006 book by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin
2003 ACM article Personas: Practice and Theory (PDF) by John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft Research)
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