I’ll start at the end. Totally agree. It’s fantastic to be able to work through these things coherently.
I haven’t really done a great deal of my publishing via this channel, but think it’ll become a core part of where I push content. These conversations are actually the value for me.
As far as the title is concerned, it was more of a humour play. I feel like I’ve failed a bit as no one has commented on the South Park reference… Mr. Mackay’s “X is bad… M’Kay?” is used in the show in a way that really only touches on the topic at the surface level. That was the point here – touch on it at the surface level but then actually dive deep. Maybe I need to rethink that strategy next time though ;)
As far as the good versus bad is concerned, I totally agree the productive part of that conversation is exposing insights from process/methodology that other people can contribute to, tear down and build upon. That was my primary objective – expose something we had been working through and get people with experience and expertise to break it down and expose weakness. I actually think as far as that is concerned, this has worked fairly well. Again, highlighting the value of the comments capability here on Medium.
I’m not ‘morally against’ personas at all. I just keep seeing them used poorly, and have found that the type of framework we employ is a way to really capture a lot of value from UXD, articulate that clearly, and then use those insights to enable teams to build really valuable stuff.
I had a mate of mine back home in Aus read this and say they loved the framework. But, they said they were attaching 3 – 5 job stories to a persona, and using that as a tool to communicate the situational context that drove people to hire or fire the products she was involved in building. I have a huge amount of respect for her and assume she is getting great results from this. Funny enough, my wife (UX Designer who co-authored this with me) often finds personas very useful as far as communicating with stakeholders is concerned. She kind of uses them as the synthesis of some of her research to get buy in, rather than as a design tool.
The long and the short of it is probably this, there’s no one size fits all. You’ve hit the nail on the head when you said this really clearly exposed the value of a good user experience design process being core to product development. Perhaps that is the single takeaway that had the most value…
