This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
This article is the second in a series exploring the benefits of the Microsoft Service Adoption framework for Government Community Clouds. Personas, personas, and more personas! In the first article, we covered technical competence.
“Persona mapping can be extremely detailed however for the purposes of our course, and your project, we recommend keeping it simple.”
The advice and activity in this (above) section are spot-on. It aligns with what we’re doing in the field today. One of the common missteps we’ve observed in the field is not following this recommendation. For example, weeks spent analyzing the workforce to build personas, identifying generic scenarios (rather than authentic and applicable to the government community), and focusing mostly on “tell them” awareness motions and not enough “show them” tangible learning motions. Keeping it simple doesn’t mean keeping your understanding of personas simple. To that end, I’m sharing three noteworthy references that helped me:
- Kill Your Personas – How persona spectrums champion real user needs (https://medium.com/microsoft-design/kill-your-personas-1c332d4908cc).
- Understanding Personas – An Interview with Alan Cooper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ljzXB40hw). Key points for me are at ~12:00 and ~56:00.
- The origin of personas (https://www.cooper.com/journal/2017/4/the_origin_of_personas).
PS: for context, I work as a full-time Service Adoption Specialist in the field (National Security, Civilian, and DoD organizations) focused on Teams, leading some of the largest and fastest adopted Teams deployments in the world. If your experience differs, I’d love to hear about it and learn from it! Thanks in advance.