Personas and Football

Alice Toth, Monday, September 17, 2007 @ 9:28 pm

This year I’m once again in the Pick a Loser football pool*. Each week, I pick an NFL team that I believe will lose and if they don’t lose, I’m out of the pool. So, for example, the first week I selected my team, the Chicago Bears, to lose (so much for fan support). They complied so I'm still in play. I can only select a team once; therefore, da Bears are off limits for the rest of the season (even though I’m fairly confident they’ll lose another game or two).

My point here is not to kvetch about our quarterback (don’t get me started) or our running back (oy), but to mention that once you Pick a Loser, you start experiencing the NFL games a bit differently. It’s not that you’re actually outright rooting for them to lose (poor sportsmanship, old bean, not at all done), but you begin to look at which team excels in mishaps, penalties, and/or position weakness, or which team is thrown off stride by an unexpected change in personnel, and how you can exploit that to ‘win’ that week.

In other words, when picking a loser I am adopting a different persona than when I pick a team to win. I have different goals and objectives, looking at the stats (data) differently and end up going down a different path (workflow) to make my selection.

This, my friend, is the point of having personas on a project. You use them to identify the different ways a user needs to interact with your product -- their point of view determines the different paths and interactions they need to take in order to achieve their goals and objectives. Once you know the different points of view, it’s a lot easier to design a flexible workflow that accommodates your users. A win-win for all.

As for me, I survived week 2 (the Chiefs in case you're interested) and now need to figure out my week 3 loser.

*disclaimer: naturally for all the kiddies out there, you should never try this at home because gambling causes your hair to fall out

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