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A new tool for creating, sharing and iterating user personas.

2 points by STYX2109 ↗ HN
I'm currently Working on a new product aimed at UX professionals and collaborative teams. Most personas created these days are not designed to make the reader care about the user, and take substantial time to develop and iterate after testing assumptions. Stakeholders need a better tool that enables them to make better design decisions, faster. So that's what I'm attempting to build. You can check it out at http://userforge.com.

Just trying to get the word out there, get some feedback, make some connections and further test my own assumptions about my intended user groups. Comments and questions welcome.

5 comments

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adrianhoward
TL;DR: As somebody actively dealing with the using persona in iterative agile/lean contexts I have no idea what you product does and how it would help me.

Longer version ;-)

Me: I'm about half dev & half UX. I do persona development among other things. For the last 10+ years that's been mostly in agile/lean contexts.

I'd disagree that the persona development is a long process. Persona documents are a communication tool — an artefact. It's user research that (can) take the time if done traditionally. Persona are one tool in communicating that research.

Managing the research, doing the analysis/synthesis of that research - that's the hard bit. Persona are one output from that. Your site reads like a persona creation tool - that's not the hard problem.

That said, using persona well in more agile/lean contexts is an issue for some folk. It's one various folk are already addressing in various ways (the ad-hoc persona structure you see from folk like Luxr, my incremental persona work, etc.). So there's definitely a problem to be solved for some people.

However, in my experience it's not really a software or tool problem. It's a discipline silos / workflow problem. One you get past that there are a bunch of existing tools that seem to support the necessary work just fine.

Reading your site I have no real idea what you product does, what pain points it solves, and how it would help.

Sorry ;-)

STYX2109
Hey Adrian, thanks for the honest feedback. Very much appreciated. Prior to building this landing page to further validate my own assumptions on the need for this type of product, I conducted some user testing and interviewed 10-12 UXers and asked them a series of questions about their current use of personas in their workflow, time allocation to them as deliverables, feedback and iteration process, and pitfalls they experience while developing them. The takeaway for me was learning that UXers value personas as a tool for driving design decisions, but would welcome a faster more efficient way to create them, a better way to share and collaborate with stakeholders and speeding up the iteration process. So that's ultimately what led me to the MVP feature set.

Obviously no product is a good fit for everyone, but if it solves a problem for enough people, its worth pursuing :)

adrianhoward
It's not the fit that's the problem for me ;-) I think there may be good fit.

The problem I have is, reading the landing page, I have no idea what the product does.

I've just shown it to three other UXish people. Neither do they ;-)

That suggests there may be a problem with the articulation here somewhere...

STYX2109
Good to know. I'll spend some time over the weekend working on the copy and trying to articulate the value prop and feature set better. Cheers :)
adrianhoward
As a comparison — I can pretty easily look at https://smaply.com/ and get an idea of what it can do and whether it would be useful to me.