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May 18, 2004
Best Buy does personas and more
Gosh, I love when design makes it into mainstream media. Recently there was IDEO in BusinessWeek (thanks Thom). Now, USA Today's covering it: Best Buy starts an overhaul, before its problems begin Best Buy's plan is to revamp its stores according to the types of customers they serve, a strategy it calls customer centricity. The company came up with five prototypical customers, all of whom have been given names: "Jill," a busy suburban mom; "Buzz," a focused, active younger male; "Ray," a family man who likes his technology practical; "BB4B" (short for Best Buy for Business), a small employer; and "Barry," an affluent professional male who's likely to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a home theater system. ... Another part of the customer centricity project transforms the usual roles for employees they're now required to help analyze sales, overtime and other figures and suggest ways to improve them. It's interesting in the context of diffusion of innovation/tipping point theory. Our UCD (the early adopters) turns into customer centricity (the early majority)? Keep bringing it on!
Comments
In my opinion I think it's a bad things when a design tools gets into the mainstream media because it leads to a misapplication of the tool. In some cases personas are used because they're trendy and not because it's the best tool for the job. This has happened where I work, management said we must use personas, but wouldn't fund the user research to create them, nor give us a target audience to construct a loose one! What use are personas then? I personally believe Personas have been hyped out of all proportion, even McDonalds are using "archetypes" for their new healthier option advertising campaign in the UK. A design should just be good, the end user shouldn't know or care what tools have been used to make it. I don't care that my plumber has a swanky new wrench, I just care that my tap is fixed! -- Posted by Matt Goddard on May 19, 2004 08:41 AMA little learning is a dangerous thing. Too, there is a point where a little bit of UCD is bad--too little can foist false security of "well, we did personas and had a usability test, so our product is usable." -- Posted by on May 19, 2004 11:29 AM
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IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .
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