Crunchberry Project

Image source: bending light/flickr

In an earlier posting I wrote about creating and using personas to guide us through our development process by helping us keep potential users in the front of our minds.  Personas give us something tangible to reference when we are brainstorming or making decisions, so we don’t get carried away with ideas that we might think are awesome, but might not be useful or relevant to our task.

We began by collecting data, through surveys and phone calls, to get information about who the users of our product are:  age, marital status, jobs, children, hobbies, computer use, Internet use, interests, etc.  We also asked them what they thought about communicating online and how often they used social networking sites. 

We put all of this together and developed six personas, which we then narrowed down to three.  We chose the personas that best represented potential users and were most distinct from one another.

This does not necessarily represent the final version of our personas.  As with all other aspects of this project, we will adjust them as we learn more.  The personas do not represent all of the potential users of our product, nor are they intended to.  Neither are they based on any single person we spoke with or the member of the Palin family whose name we used.

They help us put all the information we gathered into a person we can measure ideas against (Would “Bristol” use this tool?).