Friday, June 16, 2006

survey: mildly inappropriate persona names

We love our customers, we do we do. But when it comes to persona-driven design, do you choose to assign your personae:

a. perfectly normal common names (Don, Mary, George)
b. exotic multi-cultural names (Siobhan, Keshawn, Mao)
c. evocative cartoony names (Betty Boop, Sluggo, Felix)
d. other?

I got away with "Sluggo the Setup Author" for a while before The Man put an end to it. I'm curious what you've been able to get away with sort of names you use.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wild creativity was never the strong point of the Cranky Product Manager. And besides, she's always trying to ingratiate herself to The Man.

So "John, Bob, Mary, Alice,..." it is.

Mike said...

I've always used common names like Eric, Sue, Tina, and so on. But I have had trouble with the photos. For instance, our developers thought "Eric the Analyst" appeared smug and didn't want to feed his smugness by meeting his needs, so I replaced Eric with Keith, a geeky number-cruncher type. They, of course, designed a usable GUI to help Keith get his work done efficiently so he could get home in time for Babylon 5.