You ever read a blog post from someone on the top of their game, especially in the design arena and think, yeah that’s great, but I work in the real world, clients will laugh at that idea.
Take for example the presentation Jason Santa Maria gave at the recent An Event Apart San Francisco (see Jeremy Keith’s post, which is what I’m going off third hand). Jason suggests that we start making web sites tell a story.
I can see where he is coming from. It’s a good idea, design wise, get the web site to progress and tell the story, via the design aspect alone focusing on the core deliverable.
It’s on again, OZ-IA, the Sydney based Information Architecture conference, now in its third year (Sept 20-21st). Yet again I’ll be lobbing into Sydney for this event, and looking forward to catching up with all my IA and UX colleagues. Over the last two years I have always met new people in the field or learn a fair few new things at this conference, from the formal sessions and corridor talk.
Now OZ-IA may seem like a lay back conference, I’ll tell you it isn’t, in some respects, some of the topics can be a little full on. But that said the social aspect in previous years has been spontaneous yet entertaining.
A while back Matthew Hodgson had a glance over the usefulness of personas, I have to agree with what he had to say, they tend to be under used.
I have encountered the odd projects where they has been a distinct undercurrent to just jettison personas altogether. After all what are they good for … absolutely nothing.
Okay before you all start jumping up and down. I’m going to add to Matthew’s persona usage list and hopefully dispel this myth. I’m not going to explain how to build a persona, there are plenty of books and articles on the web that have covered this.
