I've been following the debate on the
Sakai Pedagogy list, about personas and their shortcomings.
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with this term, 'personas' are generic user profiles, similar in many respects to the consumer profiles used by marketing organisations. They are employed as a tool for systems analysis, the aim being to design and build more usable systems, by understanding the needs and intentions of the people who will use them. The process of creating a set of personas normally involves an iterative process of research / evaluation, whereby individuals' unique 'needs and intentions' are grouped into normative sets.
The problem is, they don't work. Their chief benefit is also their greatest shortcoming: personas are inherently generic. They are not tools for personalisation.
The other issue is that personas encourage systems analysts / software designers to build systems around institutional roles, instead of activities. Why!? Organisations change. Organisational and institutional roles have a tendency to mutate, shift, and/or vanish, and people may change roles within an institution - once, or several times. Changing a customised system once it's built is expensive and time-consuming.
