Intentional Design Inc.

Understanding the connection between persona development and business impact

When companies want to skimp in a development process, whether that be for a web application, a desktop application, a content management implementation, a usability project, or a documentation set, the first thing they’ll cut (if they even thought of it at all) is doing persona development. They’ll say it’s not important, or that it will get captured in the scenarios (if they do those), or in the use cases – and that’s if they do the types of use cases that capture user experience, not the type that simply talk about database interactions. In their book, The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar dispel all those naive notions and show how personas set a sound foundation on which to build. Skipping this step means building on what is likely an unstable foundation – and from the world of bricks and mortar, we know the steep costs associated with shoring up buildings with badly-constructed underpinnings. A great book with concrete suggestions for practitioners.