

A new tool for creating, sharing and iterating user personas. - STYX2109

I&#x27;m currently Working on a new product aimed at UX professionals and collaborative teams. Most personas created these days are not designed to make the reader care about the user, and take substantial time to develop and iterate after testing assumptions. Stakeholders need a better tool that enables them to make better design decisions, faster. So that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m attempting to build. You can check it out at http:&#x2F;&#x2F;userforge.com.<p>Just trying to get the word out there, get some feedback, make some connections and further test my own assumptions about my intended user groups. Comments and questions welcome.
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adrianhoward
TL;DR: As somebody actively dealing with the using persona in iterative
agile/lean contexts I have no idea what you product does and how it would help
me.

Longer version ;-)

Me: I'm about half dev & half UX. I do persona development among other things.
For the last 10+ years that's been mostly in agile/lean contexts.

I'd disagree that the persona development is a long process. Persona documents
are a communication tool — an artefact. It's user research that (can) take the
time if done traditionally. Persona are one tool in communicating that
research.

Managing the research, doing the analysis/synthesis of that research - that's
the hard bit. Persona are one output from that. Your site reads like a persona
creation tool - that's not the hard problem.

That said, using persona well in more agile/lean contexts is an issue for some
folk. It's one various folk are already addressing in various ways (the ad-hoc
persona structure you see from folk like Luxr, my incremental persona work,
etc.). So there's definitely a problem to be solved for some people.

However, in my experience it's not really a software or tool problem. It's a
discipline silos / workflow problem. One you get past that there are a bunch
of existing tools that seem to support the necessary work just fine.

Reading your site I have no real idea what you product does, what pain points
it solves, and how it would help.

Sorry ;-)

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STYX2109
Hey Adrian, thanks for the honest feedback. Very much appreciated. Prior to
building this landing page to further validate my own assumptions on the need
for this type of product, I conducted some user testing and interviewed 10-12
UXers and asked them a series of questions about their current use of personas
in their workflow, time allocation to them as deliverables, feedback and
iteration process, and pitfalls they experience while developing them. The
takeaway for me was learning that UXers value personas as a tool for driving
design decisions, but would welcome a faster more efficient way to create
them, a better way to share and collaborate with stakeholders and speeding up
the iteration process. So that's ultimately what led me to the MVP feature
set.

Obviously no product is a good fit for everyone, but if it solves a problem
for enough people, its worth pursuing :)

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adrianhoward
It's not the fit that's the problem for me ;-) I think there _may_ be good
fit.

The problem I have is, reading the landing page, I have _no idea what the
product does_.

I've just shown it to three other UXish people. Neither do they ;-)

That suggests there may be a problem with the articulation here somewhere...

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STYX2109
Good to know. I'll spend some time over the weekend working on the copy and
trying to articulate the value prop and feature set better. Cheers :)

~~~
adrianhoward
As a comparison — I can pretty easily look at
[https://smaply.com/](https://smaply.com/) and get an idea of what it can do
and whether it would be useful to me.

