[HN Gopher] Gitlab Personas
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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.
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