Bringing Users to Life Just Takes a Persona or Two

摘要

I still find that far too many intranets are being built on the basis of putting as much information (or rather, documents) as possible onto the intranet in the hope that users will be able to locate what they need through navigation and search. Site managers, perhaps because of their close allegiance to corporate marketing, generally have an appreciation of not only the diverse information requirements of different users, but also the way in which these users will seek the information. I think that one of the problems in the intranet area is that there are such a v/ide range of users that intranet managers give up trying to segment them, and just go for the easy option. One methodology that I have been using recently to develop the information architecture of intranets has been that of per-sonas. For many years, market researchers have concentrated on defining target groups of users, such as "Mothers under 25 with two or more children at school." Alan Cooper, an American software designer and the author of Visual Basic 1.0, realized that, as technology enabled software companies to provide more functionality for the same price, there was an increasing danger that