PersonaMethodology

Methodology
The actual methodology to be used is still being settled.

Liz Blanchard's past experience with building Personas:

 * In a past life, I used Jared Spool's guide on "How to build robust Personas in 30 days":
 * http://aycl.uie.com/virtual_seminars/building_personas_in_30_days_or_less
 * This does require a subscription to UIE, but it was a great resource to use as I was building personas for the first time.

Here is an overview of the steps we took:

 * 1) Built a cross-functional team including User Experience Designers, Software Testers, Documentation Specialists, Product Managers, Developers.
 * 2) Gave an overview to the team on what Personas are, how they are used, how we will construct them.
 * 3) Broke out into small teams to break down some of the preparation tasks.
 * 4) Prepared a screener to run by potential interview candidates.
 * 5) Prepared a set of interview questions and reviewed with the entire team.
 * 6) Performed a few mock interviews to practice.
 * 7) Visited 20 interviewees and asked the same interview questions to all while taking a lot of notes.
 * 8) Created a scale of answers for each question and mapped all 20 participants back to scale. (We used colored sticky notes to differentiate between all participants)
 * 9) Identified clusters of interviewees responses.
 * 10) Created persona writeups based on these clusters keeping the folks that we interviewed in mind.
 * 11) Finalized persona designs including a short write up on the persona and included a photo, Key Attributes, and Behavioral Drivers.
 * 12) Printed large versions to post around the office, small 5x7 cards on keyrings for the team to keep and reference.

A few lessons learned:

 * 1) Practicing and being on the same page about the questionaire with anyone who is interviewing is important. Some questions can be interpreted a certain way and asking the same question makes sure the data maps to the same scaled in the end.
 * 2) Jared claimed that this could be a part-time (~25%) effort for a team over 30 days. I found it to take up more like 75% of my time and more like a few months. Maybe if it was my 2nd or 3rd time running this effort it would have been a bit quicker, but it's a lot of work :)
 * 3) Someone mentioned this in our kickoff meeting, but I completely agree that having the people who will be consuming these personas (or at least some) involved in this process of building the personas is a huge step towards them buying in to using the personas.

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