[HN Gopher] Gitlab Personas ___________________________________________________________________ Gitlab Personas Author : mooreds Score : 54 points Date : 2023-01-18 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (about.gitlab.com) (TXT) w3m dump (about.gitlab.com) | davb wrote: | In a similar vein, GDS (govuk) published details of their | accessibility personas a few years ago at | https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2019/02/11/using-persona-p... | sugaroverflow wrote: | Oh that's cool, the ODS (Ontario Digital Service) also | published their personas as a part of their user research | guide: https://www.ontario.ca/page/personas | voidwtf wrote: | Why does this seem so dystopian? I'm trying to figure out why | this rubs me wrong. It seems practical, and have well defined | roles as guides seems to make sense. But some part of this feels | like it just replaced the human aspect. Like it just replaced the | team with the roles, and like it just demolished the idea that a | generalist could exist. | | I could never imagine a company getting off the ground with this | kind of system. | [deleted] | pmcp wrote: | In product design, Personas are a way to agree on jobs to be | done, scope the work and help find new ideas for features. | | In Marketing it helps to brief agencies and to talk about a big | group of people in a less homogeneous way. | | One person can be in multiple persona categories, and personas | can change or evolve over time. | | I don't see the "dystopian" aspect in it, nor do Insee it | demolish any idea. | | It's just a tool. | Centigonal wrote: | It's exactly because humans contain multitudes that teams use | personas. You can't design your ridesharing app around the | needs of Marco, the policy coordinator in Washington, DC who | loves longboarding and doesn't own a car, who needs a way to | occasionally get to his aunt's house in Frederick, MD and also | to get home after a wild EDM show - that's way too specific. | What if Marco only wants to ride in American-made cars? Other | people who need transport might not care about that. | | Instead, you can design your app around "person who lives in | the city, doesn't own a car, and needs transport for trips | outside the city ~3x/month," and "bar/concert patron who needs | transport for trips within the city ~5x/mo and may be mentally | handicapped when trying to purchase that transport." | | A "persona" is a shared part of the human experience that your | product interfaces with, and using that abstraction lets you | create products that fit neatly into many people's lives. | woodruffw wrote: | I think you're reading too much into it. Gitlab's "personas" | just seem like a slightly cutesier version of the bog-standard | "user story" technique[1]. They've also been around for about | 30 years (from a search, I wasn't aware of this before)[2]. | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story | | [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience) | [deleted] | SkyPuncher wrote: | > I could never imagine a company getting off the ground with | this kind of system. | | Well, many companies do this. | | This is a common tool for aligning around user needs. | trynewideas wrote: | These are product marketing personas describing general roles | that exist in companies that they want to sell to. They aren't | personas for who should be GitLab employees, they're a design | and sales tool. | hargup wrote: | These are buyer and user persona, not the actual role of the | people working at GitLab. Personas are a regular tool used in | product development or sales, where you create an idealized | profile of the person and then use it to model behaviors. | isthisthingon99 wrote: | Don't worry no one will ever use it except sometimes and the | one time you forgot to use it but it could have been useful and | someone will point out how you forgot to use it and it could | have been useful and you will beat yourself up about it | realizing that you will never get a promotion now! Haha jk. | francislavoie wrote: | This isn't an original thing. The concept of personas is a | common approach to doing UX testing and design. I learned about | them in my university human-computer interaction course. | | Random article from Google for example: | https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-per... | robgibbons wrote: | Personas are a popular tool in "design thinking" and are useful | for helping product owners, designers, and developers consider | the needs of a "known" set of user archetypes. The point is to | see your app through their eyes, priorities, frustrations. | Certainly there are users who don't fit any particular persona, | but for the happy paths of your app, it's helpful to give a | name to a few known "classes" of user. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-18 23:00 UTC)