@johanhal @Daria @bodamgaard Personas, buzz, people, product...

I started to ask on Twitter: Is personas(scenarios) of any worth today?

@daria and @bodamgaard responded that we still do, but need to fit the shift from the transaction to the engagement economy.

Whereas I replied that in the attention economy, where content of the real-time web is people. Why not use buzz search instead of personas?

@johanhal replied that he failed to se how buzz search replaces peronas.
@daria thinks buzz is one puzzle in the person picture/life.


Thinking out loud here.

Communication is key. What people communicate to their friends, families and new friends. So if you as a brand want to launch something, you would want to either increase their ability to communicate with each other or give them something of value that enables them to strengthen their existing relationships or build new ones.

When you have the ability, to some extent, to get a picture of who, where and what with whom people are communicating. What do you need abstract personas for when creating a product? Why not launch in alpha together with the people you try to engage, based on the insights from your buzz search? Design it together with their input?

In my head this seems to be a much better way of ensuring success of a product. Perhaps personas harms the prioritizing of features. Why limit it to 10 people when you can do it continuously with your community? Perhaps personas is too much depending of who create them. Is Personas supposed to be a tool for communicating user research findings?

I see that Personas can be great for aiding in the development of a concept before starting producing. But a buzz search can give you many valuable answers that can help prevent costly mistakes. And maybe a prototype/sketch would be better? Sure Personas can give you some a-ha experiences, but I am just thinking that 10 people, that´s just not sufficient.

What´s your opinion? How would you use Personas?
1 response
As Guy kawasaki said:
"Organizations need guideposts. They need an outline; employees need to know each day when they wake up why they're going to work. This outline should be short and sweet, and all encompassing: Why do you exist? What motivates you? I call this a mantra — a three or four-word description of why you exist."

IMHO - You need something that you can look back to when decisions are made and see if it still holds up. Whether you call it a a goal/mantra/persona/buzz search / or whatever, is up to you.