The control panel

If you want to be in control, you might need a panel.  I have been thinking a lot about control panels in UX/UI terms and the real-life and historic examples of this are an inspiration sometimes.

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This video commerce thing...better than in-store?

Summit says yes...

In the replay presentation below, Summit Sports talks about how they doubled online revenues after incorporating enlarged images, alternate views and zooming capabilities (from Adobe Scene 7) and then actually captured more than 1,400 product review videos in just three days, basically giving them a total of 3,000+ videos to help explain and sell its gear and equipment.

You have to register to watch it, but Dennis Kopitz, Director of Web Development for Summit Sports Inc. makes a good case for going this route saying that it is actually better than the in-store experience.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Check out the store and grab that wakeboard I've always wanted at http://summitonline.com

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HTML5 Web Experience on iPad

I guess it will be better later.

 

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Customer Process Management

(Disclaimer: Since I heard so much about CPM being dead as a pricing model I would like to reclaim the acronym for something useful)

There are no shortage of business process management professionals, businesses, problems, platforms, analysts, books, theories, architectures and general products and services. People have spent years building up massive practices and businesses and used this BPM terminology in order to help move us from the archaic world of database and legacy-centric thinking that has built monolithic applications and waterfall-en methodologies around core business processes. We managed the unmanageable by wrapping management capabilities around the processes and exposing this management layer to the various users who ultimately owned or had to interact with those processes.

We wrapped our lingo franca up with some analytics, intelligence, integration points and made sure that we could deliver this in some useful fashion. We integrated to service buses and SOA back ends, consumed REST and SOAP endpoints, dressed it up in Flash and AJAX and pushed these processes out to users and yes, even customers.

And so at some point, we actually blindly entered a space where we had customers managing their view of business processes. We had dressed up these business processes with some kind of front end and exposed appropriate elements and touchpoints of those business processes out to customers. We had customers managing processes. But the business owned the process right? They owned the outcome right? It ultimately benefited the business right?

Now we have added Social BPM - the latest shiny object in the information workplace - social collaboration around the business and associated business processes that require new levels of collaboration. That collaboration also apparently, from time to time, may involve customers.

Don't customers (don't we) have our own processes? Actually we also have the ability to manage our processes too. But, unfortunately noone is exposing any Customer Process Management endpoints for us to consume, use, interact with or ultimately use to do the things we want to do.

I want all vendors to please submit their products and services to my 'vendor selection process' - please compare your prices, service levels, warranties, etc in a standard way so that I can consume these into my selection process.

Once I have completed my vendor selection process, please supply the product or service at appropriate intervals for the agreed upon price. Submit any variations in service level, quality, timeliness, friendliness, or things I may not have thought of to my vendor evaluation process.

When I love you and what you do and refer you to a friend, please accept my consumption of the 'mimic me and don't fail' service together with my 'these guys are good' service to ensure a constant fidelity with your new service endpoint based on expectations set in my instance.

Is it just a subtlety, or is there a notion where we as consumers could own our processes, could force endpoints to be met in terms of an SLA and commitment as a condition of doing business? I think we are in control of the money that gets spent and it seems to me that all too often we let inconsistent service, poor pricing practices, overt marketing attempts for upsell and cross-sell to ultimately impact our perceptions of quality but we carry on disheartened but stalwart in our willingness to compromise and let business fail at our expense. What choice do we really have? We have self selected into a business process and are now inserting coins in the slot to keep the monkey dancing.

Imagine, with me, for a minute a world inverted and built in our favour, where those who want our money, loyalty and commitment ultimately meet us on our terms.

OK, back to work...and go ahead, keep CPM for whatever you were using it for already.

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Like. Social Shopping.

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Tubby Toast

OTTAWA - Two random thoughts collided on the internet today causing a devastating urge to write down the following nonsense.

I have been reading this very insightful paper called "Attuning Notification to User Goals and Attention Costs" by D. Scott McCrickard and C.M. Chewar which is all about trade-offs we need to make in notification systems in order to support user access to additional information from sources secondary to their primary activity.  In parallel I have been looking into indexing and mapping strategies that best resemble classification schemes, such that a developer could actually surface best practices to the UX layer as a catch-all for 'everything that is possible".  Somewhere in between these two extremes for navigation and interruption is the actual paper I am working on with a few colleagues around defining all of these patterns of interaction in an attempt to create better dialogue, more utility in taxonomy and agility in the way we address interaction layers.

While on the trail of classification I came across a brilliant new post from Donna Spencer called Classification Schemes (and when to use them) http://bit.ly/cOWowu and within that she talks about best practices for classification inclusive of good old-fashioned Alphabetical indices and some great insight in terms of the opportunity to educate and inform users even within this seemingly mundane approach to experience.  As any good author would, she cites a few examples and her example of a best practice in this regard is the BBC "A Whole Lot More" function which is essentially an alphabetical listing of all their sites aptly located at http://www.bbc.co.uk/a-z/.  BBC provides the alphabet linked across the top nav element of that page and uses the remaining real estate to showcase Categories and enables horizontal scrolling of that category.

And here comes the collision...

On that categorical horizontal scroller I was drawn immediately to the lower right of the page (I assume I must have already adequately inspected the top left) wherein I was greeted by the familiar (I have children) waving form of the purple Teletubby, Tinky Winky.  Tinky Winky, unlike the other characters featured more demurely, even sombre and moody, in their category boxes was smiling, animated, welcoming and engaging and I realized he was hogging my attention on the page.  For those familiar with the Teletubby cartoon, you will know that they do things that little children like to do, such as rolling on the ground, laughing, running about, and watching real children on the televisions embedded in their stomachs.  Their stomachs accept one form of substance, a waffle-like form that ejects vigorously from their readily available toaster called Tubby Toast.

And that's when it struck me.  Henceforth, overexuberant notification systems that dominate attention span in an unbalanced way will always be referred to as Tubby Toast.  That's it.

Thank you, Interwebz, for this unique form of conspired inspiration and the ability to share it.  Hopefully you were notified of this article's existence in a usual, predictable and friendly fashion that gave you latitude to continue with your original task.

If you were looking for information on actual Tubby Toast, you can learn how to make your own here: http://www.pbs.org/parents/birthdayparties/teletubbies/food_toast.html but bear in mind you will be hard pressed to use that for any form of digital notification system.

 

  

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A play on violins

Violin sculptures from Phillipe Guillerm.

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Y?

Who spends more time on Facebook than they do with their family?

Who has played more than 5,000 hours of games and sent more than 250,000 emails?

 

 

Wei Liu is a designer, studying interaction design in Amsterdam, and is looking for people to share experiences and ideas that relevant to his research. If you would like to share your thoughts with Wei, please input/discuss your thoughts on http://generationyinteractions.blogspot.com/  where there is already some interesting things posted. He is especially looking for your input for the following questions:

a) What are the characteristics/classifications of 'Generation Y'?
b) What are the relevant trends/opportunities in interaction design?
c) How to map these characteristics into the development of 'Generation Y' interface?

That's Y.

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Adobe Cloud Computing - LiveCycle ES Cloud instances

Original post on: http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/01/adobe-cloud-computing-livecycle-es.html

In case you missed the news on January 12, Adobe is now offering Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express. This is Adobe's first (but not last) major foray into the world of enterprise cloud computing. The LC ES Developer Express software is a full version of Adobe LiveCycle ES that is hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment and provides a virtual, self-contained development environment where enterprise developers can prototype, develop, and test LiveCycle applications

Feature set?

• Provides pre-installed, pre-configured virtual instances of LiveCycle ES.
• Reduce time required to download, install, and boot new server instances.
• Develop LC ES applications in a fraction of the time.
• Virtual instances can be used to build proof-of-concepts

The base installation provides the following LiveCycle ES server applications pre-installed:

• LiveCycle Forms ES
• LiveCycle Reader Extensions ES
• LiveCycle Rights Management ES
• LiveCycle Barcoded Forms ES
• LiveCycle Digital Certificate ES
• LiveCycle Output ES
• LiveCycle Process Management ES
• LiveCycle Content Services ES
• LiveCycle PDF Generator ES

LiveCycle Production Print, LiveCycle BAM, and LiveCycle PDFG 3D are not included in this installation. In the Developer Express installation, LiveCycle is running on the JBoss application server and the MySQL database. The first screenshot below shows one of my three instances up and running:



Once you get an instance up and running, it appears to be virtually running on localhost:8080. There is a small download called LiveCycle Developer Express (shown below), which then allows you to log in to the instance running in the cloud.

Once you log in, select the instance:

and hit "Connect". Once you connect, you will be able to log in by accessing the admin panel via a browser. The URL is http://localhost:8080/adminui/secured/admin.faces. Note below that I am now logged in as Admin while running it in the cloud from my Mac. What does this mean? LC ES on the Mac!!!


From here you can browse all running services on the instance:


or manage endpoints:


The service, available to all members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, allows developers to bullet-proof their applications without having to invest in a development environment or test lab. I will be unveiling more on a future episode of Duane's World when we get into SOA and ESB cloud architecture.

Author: Duane "Chaos" Nickull (pictured) is an Adobe employee and lifelong musician, cynic, traveler, athlete, author and first class antagonist.

Detritus

Digital Detritus - Earth from Peter Root.

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Ephimicropolis

The making of Ephemicropolis from Peter Root on Vimeo.

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Experience

An example of how Java can effectively support Flash ;-)

iPhone still tops for mobile ads

Recent TechCrunch post with stats from Millenial Media indicates continued "leadership" for MacOS devices in terms of mobile ad delivery. iPhone was seconded only by other Mac devices, but it was interesting to see RIM in the overall #2 spot, which seems to prove that they have broken into the consumer/end-user space quite aggressively.

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UX Sense...

Since so many UX posts still focus on "what is UX" or "why is UX" and the plethora of posts are starting to cement a broader awareness and general understanding of UX craft, I wanted to help out and lend my take on things. Maybe its just a baseline for this blog, or perhaps it will help someone starting out.

User Experience put simply makes things easier, better and more valuable for the end user. Often motivated by simply enabling the accomplishment of goals (the light is green, you can go now) a user experience professional should be the best and most vocal user advocate on the team, carefully balancing business goals, technical / development limitations and organizational requirements to ultimately support this new and pure focus on the user.

Following some semblance of a process and path iteratively, UX teams will build knowledge, manifest options and refine implementations together with all the other stakeholders and craftspeople in the mix. In general these steps towards a well lit path are as follows:

1. Conduct user research to understand the requirements, painpoints, ethnography and psychology of the end user. You may already have a raft of input and usability drivers based on previous versions of the project or what other people are doing in similar situations. For example, if you are working for a bank, learn from your own banking experience or perhaps conversations with family and friends about how their experiences are good, bad or ugly or even awesome. These emotional insights can be golden.
   
2. Identify aspects of the driving business strategy that can be articulated to clearly define user profiles, scenarios, and their importance to other stakeholders in order to capture all the necessary requirements and validate them.
   
3. Seek to understand, imagine and document the various outcomes, starting with users themselves, but also with appropriate evaluation and inputs to project managers to estimate, the developers to build, marketing teams to educate and communicate, partners to evangelize, sales to sell, support teams to help out, etc...this may take the form of wireframes, documents, whiteboards, presentations, whitepapers, napkin sketches, meetings, phone calls, obsessive ranting or lucid dreams (okay, I'll stop).
   
4. Iteratively design the functionality, interface and interaction of the various required visual components, focusing on standards (e.g. brand usage, standard iconography) and usability notions such as feedback, performance and outputs. A best practice at this time is to involve users, stay in constant dialogue with development teams and continually gain buy-in from business teams.
5. Often once the iterative step is mature UX pros may come up with a well designed functional prototype and once again iteratively test it for usability flaws.
6. Project Managers should now be ranting on about versioning and release dates and timelines for developement cycles, indicating their comprehension of effort and direction ;-) You may agree that it is important to document every single point observed from the initial user research to how it shaped the product and how it has been taken into account.
7. Once a version is ready, we conduct more usability testing now ensuring that the test scores perfectly against the output of the initial user research findings.
8. As we conduct this last round of testing we evaluate and validate the relationship between the product and its supporting materials - documentation, FAQs, How-To, Quick Stat Guides, Tips - for consistency of experience and language
9. Once the product is relased, keep an eye on forums, blogs, and any kind of structured or unstructured feedback and statistical or behavioral analysis that will reflect the solutions user experience maturity and inform necessary iterations as we move forward.
10. Now we post the story about our work, what we did, get our talk ready for Adobe MAX, or get the screenshots and customer quotes ready for our book ;-)

This may not be all the steps and I have deliberately avoided complex or hardened methodologies typically proven out over long periods of time in well-established teams. This is more about what you can do, how you can go from having an interest in what UX is to actually doing it on your next project and helping to grow your business by investing in one of its best assets - customers or users and how much they love using your products or services.

Finally I would prefer to go over this article and replace every instance of USER with the word PEOPLE, but that's another story.

Best Snowboard Tricks

Best tricks "landed" - that's always good.

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Collaboration=Conversations

It is interesting to read through this presentation through the lens of corporate collaboration or collaborative applications...

Crucial Conversations In Social Media

View more presentations from Kelsey Ruger.

iMonetize Everything

iDoit with iAd. (not me personally of course)

This image on the right linked from MobileBeat article provides a more balanced view of the story than my conjecture and opinionated blast below.

Apple's mobile strategy brilliantly accomplishes what so many startups try to do - build a massive, loyal, captive market before fully monetizing every single little thing that market does - iAd confirms that this strategy remains a pretty brilliant move!

The fact that most people don't get why iAd is so brilliant makes it even more brilliant - Apple needed to get past the top of the adoption curve, move beyond fanboys into the mainstream, in fact turn a phone into a fashion accessory and status symbol (again), without an ad play in the public eye that would massively reduce credibility of the platform in the early days.

Once they had the platform at critical mass, and had locked down all the inroads, then they were able to release an at-scale ad play to further monetize the distribution. And they can now make a % of every click, impression or scene change in their own proprietary version of rich media.

This also provides another clear reason (more clear than most of the B$ and raving lunacy that's out there) why they did not want Flash on the platform - motivated app developers could have easily served up their own in-context, targeted or even DoubleClick and Yahoo! served ads over video, in-game, or within web-based RIA applications without ever clicking the Apple clock. The only players that really matter who are targeting the Apple platform today are getting bought, or soon will...

The good news is that this move will increase the credibility and overall percent spend allocated to mobile, but there will be some work to do since big advertisers/agencies will continue to favor existing formats and ad serving, auditing and reporting technology to deliver integrated campaigns (cross-media) for some time.

Apple knows this and will likely posit for the high-end of the CPM/CPA target - but in a frequently sold-out market the more floor there is (bottom pricing/wide avail) the more value they can bring as the user base becomes more addressable, and if they get their targeting (geo, gender, income, interest, behavior, spend pattern) sorted out for a captive audience then they will start to dominate (at least on their own platform).

Basically, if iPhone came with an ad platform story three years ago everyone would have cried foul. And if they had allowed other platforms in they would give up a portion of dollars beyond the platform and app that they knew (and so did everyone pretty much) would be forthcoming.

I love Apple, don't get me wrong - I love any brand that has a great user experience and works that hard to maintain it across platforms but I see cracks in the bauble that are somewhat worse and somehow seem even more dangerous than the roadscars on my MacBook Pro (but that's another story).

Connect or Die: How to survive in a Music 2.0 world

Great read in this new deck from espresso's Marta Kagan. Brilliant, provocative, educational and just the perfect amount of 'obviously' to keep you feeling smart.

Connect or Die: How to survive in a Music 2.0 world

View more presentations from Marta Kagan.

The end of publishing...the future of publishing.

Make sure you watch it up to at least the halfway point...brilliant. This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books. Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. Read an interview with the creator of the video on the Penguin Blog: http://bit.ly/futureofpublishing

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Personas

Great collection of introductory resources on personas and UX process from Australia's Dey Alexander.

• An introduction to personas and how to create them
  "This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas, and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own."
  (Tina Calabria - Step Two Designs)

• Getting started with personas (PDF)
  "This whitepaper will go through the basic persona building steps. It is based on a collection of persona building blog posts from FutureNow’s GrokDotCom blog."
  (Howard Kaplan - FutureNow)

• How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better, part 1
  "This is the first of two articles in which I’ll be making the business case for using personas and scenarios to improve your website. I’ll give you a flavour of what’s involved in using the personas and scenarios and provide a few examples of the kinds of problems we’ve solved for our clients using these techniques. In this first article, we’ll look at the core concepts of personas, leaving scenarios until next month."
  (John Wood - IQ Content)

• How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better, part 2
  "Personas and scenarios are techniques for representing your users and the things they do on your website. They are one of the key tools in iQ Content’s arsenal, and we deploy them at every opportunity because they deliver more benefits for less effort than anything else that we do. In fact, we have seen this technique transform confused and failing web projects by providing a sense of direction and purpose that set the team on the road to success."
  (John Wood - IQ Content)

Discussion articles

• Accessibility in the analysis phase: personas 
  "The purpose of personas is to make the users seem more real, to help designers keep realistic ideas of users throughout the design process. A persona with a disability includes the same specific characteristics, demographics, experience level, and personal details as other personas. Personas that include accessibility considerations also include a description of the limiting condition (disability or situational limitation) and the adaptive strategies for using the product."
  (Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)

• Accessibility in the analysis phase: user group profiles 
  "User group profiles describe the characteristics of product users, the people who use a product. Because many designers start out with little or no familiarity with accessibility issues, adding accessibility considerations to user group profiles is particularly important."
  (Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)

• Ad-hoc personas and empathetic focus 
  "Do Personas have to be accurate? Do they require a large body of research? Not always, I conclude. The Personas must indeed reflect the target group for the design team, but for some purposes, that is sufficient."
  (Donald Norman)

• A persona 'ah-ha' (PDF)
  "In an attempt to communicate that “ah-ha” moment of mental re-organization brought on by a really valid persona, I’ve attached a simplified before personas and after personas scenario. I hope you find it useful."
  (Bonnie Rind)

• Bringing your personas to life in real life
  "When presenting, talking about your personas, or referring to them in writing, communicate as though they are real people, people that you know. Express it like you are talking about a friend."
  (Elan Freydenson - Boxes and Arrows)

• Creating personas for information rich websites
  "Design personas are one of the most powerful tools in a designer’s toolbox. They help bring the vibrant, living presence of 'a specific user' into your design process. They facilitate communication between your engineering, marketing and design teams. Trouble is, how to get started with the making or creation of personas." 
  (Rashmi Sinha)

• Creating quality personas: understanding the levers that drive user behaviour (PDF) 
  "The best personas will also go the extra step to describe key behaviors such as a decision making process, an information browsing approach, or a shopping mode - the drivers that affect how people approach a given solution."
  (Shannon Ford)

• Customer story-telling at the heart of business success 
  "As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organization continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. Traditional segmentation identifies and categorizes a current or potential audience based upon common characteristics, including demographics, attitudes, behavior, transactions, frequency of interaction, spend, and more. They are discovered by 'doing the math', which may include data aggregation, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and other statistical methods applied to large sample sets. And then segments are given catchy names like Savvy Skeptics, Active Balancers, Indulgent Nutritionist, or Trade-Uppers. When done right, segments are statistically derived from the analysis and synthesis of quantitative data and are a solid foundation for customer understanding. We create personas to build upon that platform by bringing the individuals within those segments to life. These are prototypical, but fundamentally real, stories of the multidimensional lives of specific customers. This report discusses how the Arc Worldwide’s Experience Planning group uses storytelling and multidimensional customer-based stories to provide relevance, direction, and resonance in today’s business planning landscape." 
  (Parrish Hanna - Boxes and Arrows)

• Getting from research to personas: harnessing the power of data
  "The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona."
  (Kim Goodwin - Cooper)

• Is this you? (Reader persona design: an example)
  "Do you work in a medium-to-large organization whose web content you feel could be put to better use? If so, you’re my target reader." 
  (Gerry McGovern - New Thinking)

• Key steps in creating your reader persona 
  "The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide what readers you are not going to focus on. Good web management is often more about what you exclude than what you include."
  (Gerry McGovern - New Thinking)

• Making personas more powerful: details to drive strategic and tactical design
  "Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design, but they've unfortunately become more of a check-off item than a useful tool. So how did we get here?"
  (George Olsen - Boxes and Arrows)

• Making personas sparkle like diamonds, part 1 
  "Early in our company's life, persona development was largely an intuitive process. We wanted to develop a process we could use to train clients and partners to duplicate the persona development process. To do this, we delved into literature and film to understand character development. We were fortunate to be introduced to a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and script evaluator, David Freeman. Freeman taught us about 'character diamonds'... Today we'll share what we learned."
  (Bryan Eisenberg - ClickZ)

• Making personas sparkle like diamonds, part 2
  "Last week, we discussed what we learned from David Freeman's character diamonds and masks. This week, we study these, and their applications, in more depth. Here's more from David Freeman."
  (Bryan Eisenberg - ClickZ)

• Perfecting your personas
  "It's easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective design and communication tools. If you have begun to create your own personas, here are some tips to help you perfect them."
  (Kim Goodwin - Cooper)

• Persona creation and usage toolkit (PDF) 
  "This toolkit provides resources for a variety of situations. enables you to build up detailed profiles of the personas themselves, their relationship to the product, and the context in which they use the product. The intended user of the toolkit is the product’s designer."
  (George Olsen)

• Persona development and the law of averages 
  "Persona is a hot buzzword in this industry, yet most companies that create personas haven't fully embraced everything they have to offer. Most personas are watered-down and hard to relate to. The worst of the lot are lifeless outlines of a company's demographic targets. Most often, they don't deliver the expected outcome from using the persona approach."
  (Bryan Eisenberg - Clickz)

• Persona development for information rich designs (PDF)
  "Defining information architecture for complex web sites requires understanding user information needs and mental models in that domain. Personas, or user archetypes, created for such domains should also reflect types of information needs, and usage of information set. We have created a statistical technique to identify important underlying groupings of information needs. In a preliminary study, we show how designers can use this information in conjunction with data from interviews and observations to generate and refine personas."
  (Rashmi Sinha)

• Persona-led heuristic inspection is here
  "Sometimes we need to review a product for usability in circumstances where usability testing isn’t an option. Lack of time, lack of budget, unwilling client: you name it. So an improvement on the heuristic inspection would be a great idea."
  (Caroline Jarrett - Usability News)

• Persona non grata
  "Without any research to back assumptions, it's easy to end up with a product built for what designers think the users are like, rather than what the users really are like. It's the difference between reading about someone and actually meeting them, between fantasy and reality. The best personas are really conceptual models, which help you to digest the user research in a coherent way. They put a name and face to an observed pattern of behavior."
  (Dan Saffer - Adaptive Path)

• Personas and contextual design
  "Personas, introduced by Alan Cooper, are a technique of goal-directed design that is meant to help designers gain clarity and provide focus during the design process. They describe the goals and activities of archetypal users in a 1-2 page description based on a few ethnographic interviews with real users. Aside from the fact that personas are a current design trend, what makes personas interesting? Certainly they are seductive to design teams since they can be quick to create if they only require a few (2-3) interviews and a good writer. But good designers and managers know that reliable requirements gathering and design that meets the needs of the business, the market, and the user is not so simply constructed. So something else must be going on."
  (Karen Holzblatt - InContext)

• Personas and storytelling
  "Personas work because they tell stories. Stories are part of every community. They communicate culture, organize and transmit information. Most importantly, they spark the imagination as you explore new ideas. They can ignite action."
  (Whitney Quesenbery)

• Personas and the customer decision-making process
  "With this case study I want to show how our team used the concept of personas - fictional, representative user archetypes - and the customer decision-making process model in a project, in order to capture the nature of customers and their needs and concerns as they progress through the customer decision-making process."
  (Henrik Olsen - guuui.com)

• Personas and user profiles
  A collection of resources from STC Usability SIG. Includes articles on creating personas, case studies, sample personas.

• Personas, goals and emotional design
  "In the first three chapters of Emotional Design, Norman presents his three-level theory of cognitive processing and discusses its potential importance to design. However, Emotional Design does not suggest a method for systematically integrating Norman’s insightful model of cognition and affect into the practice of user experience design." 
  (Robert Reimann - UXmatters)

• Persona sketching
  "The value of personas in Web design is certainly debatable, but I've found them very useful, if for nothing else then using them to help pull your clients and stakeholders into a discussion about the people what interact with your designs. As well, they can be use for many other things aside from informing Web design and can be a great way to pull business and user goals together."
  (D. Keith Robinson)

• Personas: matching a design to the users' goals
  "By closely adhering to the goals of a specific persona, the designers satisfy the needs of the many users who have goals similar to those of the persona. The process is even more effective when designers design for several personas simultaneously, as they can satisfy an even larger number of users."
  (Christine Perfetti - User Interface Engineering)

• Personas: practice and theory (PDF)
  "In three years of use, our colleagues have extended Cooper's technique to make personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. This article describes our approach and outlines the psychological theory that explains why personas are more engaging than design based on scenarios."
  (John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft)

• Personas: setting the stage for building usable information sites
  "As long as personas are developed with diligence, the planning and development tool has three key benefits for interface design projects of all kinds. First, personas introduce teams to hypothetical users who have names, personal traits, and habits that in a relatively short time become believable constructs for honing design specifications. Second, personas are stand-ins with archetypal characteristics that represent a much larger group of users. Third, personas give design teams a strong sense of what users' goals are and what an interface needs to fulfill them."
  (Alison J Head - Information Today)

• Practical persona creation
  "What I'll do here is show you a quick and easy method to help you create your personas, as well as the basics of how they can be used. This is by no means going to be the only way this can be done, nor is it the only way personas can be used. There is much more to the world of personas than I'll be discussing here."
  (D Keith Robinson - evolt.org)

• Reconciling market segments and personas
  "Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organisations can use to design and sell successful products."
  (Elaine Brechin - Cooper)

• Taking the "you" out of user: my experience using personas 
  "In 1999, I co-founded a small San Francisco-based start-up called Pyra. Our plan was to build a web-based project management tool and we chose to focus initially on web development teams for our target audience since, as web developers ourselves, we had intimate knowledge of the user group..."
  (Meg Hourihan - Boxes and Arrows)

• The origin of personas
  "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness."
  (Alan Cooper - Cooper)

• The power of the persona (PDF)
  "Personas enhance focus, communication and collaboration on any project. You should particularly consider using personas in your company when there are conflicting visions of the product, when you experience difficulties in communication between Product Management, Development, and/or Marketing, or whenever your products seem to be falling short of your users' expectations."
  (Bonnie Rind)

• The return on investment for personas
  "Extract from The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind throughout Product Design by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin."
  (Anne Light - Usability News)

• The role of personas in successful scenario design 
  "Scenario design helps users achieve their goals. How do you plan scenarios? Well, if you're designing scenarios for a commercial Web site, one that demonstrates return on investment (ROI) by getting sales, leads, or registrants, you design persuasive scenarios by turning the information you have on your users into personas."
  (FutureNow)

• Three important benefits of personas 
  "Personas are becoming a regular staple in many of the development teams we talk to. The method helps teams make a smooth translation between requirements and design, resulting with much cleaner designs. The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when you see the method in full force. It's these benefits that guide our belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come." 
  (Jared M Spool - User Interface Engineering)

• Using personas to create user documentation 
  "Personas and other user-modelling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too."
  (Steve Calde - Cooper)

• When you create personas, stay clear of stereotypes
  "You might not see their faces out there behind the computer screens and your Web analytics, but you are dealing with real people who have real needs and complicated motivations. Create a persuasive architecture based on stereotypes, and you’re gonna miss the boat."
  (grokdotcom)

• Why is it so hard to make products that people love?
  "Business people don’t sit in their offices wondering how they can make a product uglier, and designers don’t want to create products that won’t sell. Everybody (usually) wants to do the right thing for the company, the products and the customers. So why do so many good designs get trampled during the product development process? To make successful products, designers and business people need to speak each other's language. They need a translator to help them understand each others’ goals and decision-making process so that instead of inadvertently working against each other, they can make each others’ jobs easier. Personas are excellent translators between design and business. "
  (Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt - AIGA Design Forum)

• Yahoo's approach to keeping personas alive
  "One of the big struggles teams have is creating a long-term adoption of their target personas. While personas are often accepted initially, it’s hard for the team to keep them 'alive' for the entire project duration. Our research has shown those teams which manage to keep them alive are more likely to produce more usable designs, so we’re always interested in new techniques."
  (Jared M Spool - User Interface Engineering)

• Introducing personas in a software project (PDF)
  This Masters thesis investigates the process of creating personas and introducing their use into an ongoing software project, with the objective of providing the development team with information on user goals and characteristics as well as tools to use this information effectively.

• Creating and using personas and scenarios to guide site design (PDF)
  A presentation on the development and use of personas by Razorfish. 
  (Dai Pham, Janiece Greene)

• Data driven design research personas
  "Data driven design research personas and the persona DNA profile."
  (Todd Warfel - Messagefirst)

• How to effectively focus on your website users: creating personas
  "You can effectively focus on your website and intranet users by creating personas. Common complaints, mistakes and problems and be solved through using personas to provide a clear focus for website and intranet design. Case Study and benefits of using personas are provided."
  (Catherine Elder - Prescient Digital Media)

• Personas: Bringing Users Alive (PDF)
  Presentation from 2003
  (Whitney Quesenbery)

• Putting Personas to Work (PDF)
  "Improving your scenarios, reviews and usability testing with personas"
  (Whitney Quesenbery)

• The user is always right: making personas work for your site
  "How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need and deliver results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right information. Discover the latest techniques for creating personas, including advice on conducting user interviews, new methods for applying quantitative research such as surveys and log file analysis, approaches for generating persona segmentation, and fun ideas for making your personas real. It's time to take personas to the next level."
  (Steve Mulder - Mulder Media)

Examples and templates

• Example personas 
  "Fictional examples of personas that include accessibility considerations." 
  (Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)

• Example personas
  "One thing to point out, depending on the site and the requirements the information gathered may be different. With these I asked alot of questions about online shopping and other things related to the Daisy Bead site."
  (Keith D Robinson - Asterisk)

• Example user group profiles 
  "Fictional examples of user group profiles that include accessibility considerations." 
  (Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)

• Example personas (PDF)
  Three example personas drawn from client work by Quarry Integrated Communications. 

• Organisational management personas (PDF)
  A set of personas for a HR application, showing primary, secondary and other personas.

• Persona chart (Word)
  From Adaptive Path, a document showing the format for a sample persona.

• Personas for the S2S Project
  Personas for a software development project.

• Persona templates
  "I'm sharing the source file templates for my data-driven personas. The main file is an InDesign (INDD) file and the visual chart is in Illustrator file. I've included a few versions, including PDF, CS3 and CS4. The CS3 and CS4 versions include a PDF."
  (Todd Warfel)

• Personal templates V2
  "Based on a few requests, I’ve included a few versions, including PDF, CS3 and CS4. The CS3 and CS4 versions include a PDF."
  (Todd Warfel)

• Razorfish personas (PDF)
  A set of three personas for a financial investment website, showing personal narrative and key characteristics along with scenarios of use.

• Web Accessibility Initiative personas
  Set of personas apparently developed for use during the redevelopment of the WAI website.

• Web Master Portal - roles and scenarios
  Includes a persona of a webmaster.

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