Thanks for the comments, fellas.

Dan - I’m glad that you took the pilgrimage, too. I did the same thing. we’re talking a lot about “briefing” (as opposed to or to compliment “a brief”) at CM right now. There’s no doubt that telling a compelling story is one of the best ways for people to share experience and insight. I think the better of our account planner bethren (ie. Jon Steel) know and practice this.

Misha - thanks for the comment and for Threeminds, Organic’s great blog. I saw your post before I wrote this one and was tempted to challenge Steve. I agree that his case is maybe too strong for some, but I appreciate how it challenged me to think differently. In the end, dialog is good, even if some of it is heated.

I like your additive response to Steve’s critique. I respect him as a practitioner but I think this article is basically bomb-throwing. You could just as easily take some poorly-done ethnography and use it as a straw man to bash first-person research.

I think you are dead-on that different types of customer insights work are more or less appropriate for different types of projects. In the case of first person research, it’s great when you have an item or a system that you are testing with the public- typical for interaction designers like Adaptive Path for example- but pretty useless when it comes to product innovation. My favorite line here: “Nobody ever asked for an iPod in a focus group (or a one-on-one interview)”.

Coming back to personas, we have had many of the same experiences at Organic- great for IAs, mixed results with designers, great for transactional sites, of questionable value for branded entertainment. I would add a couple more nuances - great for specific verticals, very difficult to develop for a mass market brand. When we have used personas for B2B clients, they take on a very different flavor- more like detailed, relational job descriptions than psychographic portraits. Still useful, but they test our more design-friendly templates.

If you want to see a rebuttal, here’s what I had to say: http://threeminds.organic.com/2008/01/why_personas_matter.html

Your post started me on something of a “persona pilgrimage” this morning, through Steve’s article, Merholz, Spool, Chris Fahey on graphpaper.com and finally, back here. I tend to agree with Spool’s point that the most substantial value of the process is in gathering the data and creating meaning. But then comes the challenge of, as you put it, “communicat[ing] our findings to the group that had to stay behind and to do it in a way that can be inspiring.”

I wonder sometimes if “persona descriptions” (to follow Spool’s “vacation versus the photo album” nomenclature), even well-executed ones, don’t throw up an obstacle between the researchers/meaning-makers and those who had to stay behind. I recently had a new member of our team ask me to talk to her about the users of the website we’re designing. I could have just pointed her to our persona document, but instead I chatted with her about what we discovered in our research, what I saw as the implications of that for our design process, etc. I think our persona descriptions are actually pretty good, not at all like the cartoony nightmares Portigal describes (well, okay, we did use stock photos)… but my chat with our new team member made me think that maybe a more “direct” communication of research and meaning — without the fictional gloss and overlay of the persona description — isn’t really the best way to go.

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