Fossilizing people into models. What do we gain and what do we lose?

Back in the 1980’s Apple democratized computers by integrating Xerox Parc’s intuitive GUI, which was more usable and easy to understand by the common population.

I am not the persona, and the persona is not me.

Well-crafted personas have great benefits!

In 1983, Alan Cooper created the first design persona, realizing how focusing on real…

Highs and Lows of Modeling People

Personas have always been an interesting yet controversial topic in today’s User Experience field…

Personas, Words, Characters: Containers for Meaning

Personas are basically a composite of multiple people — an expressive container for insights collected through research about individuals that collected and developed to help design teams empathize and assume the perspective of the users…

People Models: Many Lows but still useful

Sally is a skeptic. She is definitely a skeptic. Wait, is she?

People Modeling — What’s really Important

In order to design effectively, designers need to develop a deep understanding of the individuals that we are designing experiences for. We need to understand their needs as relates to the problem area that we are venturing to solution for, but we also need…

Reducing people to models — Limitations of human modeling

Chaotic systems and complex organisms are hard to understand but they are even harder to process. Models give us the capability to understand these complex networks, link up related points and deduce patterns or find gaps in the…