Personas, Common Sense and Domain-specific thinking...

I read this post on Personas from 37Signals - who declare themselves not in favour of them - and at the time, I thought, "hmm, don't agree", but couldn't be bothered commenting. Then I saw Robbie picked up on it, and mentioned the conversation that had been generated.

So where do I stand on personas? Well, from practical experience, I'm in favour: I develop ideas for many audiences across many industries. A good example is building a Teletubbies broadband application... I'm not sure that without a persona, or research to back that up, then appealing to my own tastes would have made a compelling experience...

As one commenter points out:

Because 37 signals designs software for other designers and web 2.0 types their opinion on design methods are not always useful to those of us who design for other groups. They don’t have to design for other people, because they can succeed by designing for themselves.

Anyhow, the issue here is not whether I'm in favour of them or not: the point is that it makes sense to have an arsenal of useful techniques that can be applied in appropriate circumstance, rather than slavishly following some methodology or anti-methodology or whatever. Agile - right?

I like a lot of things 37signals has to say - essentially because I consider them to be generally 'common sense', though I think sometimes they present these ideas as "Hey, look what we just thought of..." when really the ideas and principles are out there already.

So I think about an experience I had last year when I was helping with Running the Gauntlet (a sort of Dragons' Den run by one of the original dragons: Doug Richards) and I was surprised by the amount of ideas that were good, great even, but only in the context of their domain. As soon as you move outside of the domain, so move from automotive to, say, gambling then you'd find that actually the idea had already been crunched and delivered, or simply wasn't so good in a wider context.

So, in this instance, a view on a specific domain - building Web2.0 apps for Web2.0 people - maybe leads to a good conclusion in the domain, but one that perhaps doesn't work outside of it.