Japanese companies pick up on personas
As I mentioned in my December 2007 post, I've given presentations at events in Tokyo and Osaka, organized by the Persona Consortium. Next up is Nagoya (Feb 15 - this Friday).
http://www.personadesign.net/consortium/2007/12/post_15.html
What was the response?
- Rooms filled to capacity
In Tokyo we squeezed 90 people into the lecture hall at the Mitsubishi Research Institute. In Osaka we filled CSK's 50-person presentation room. There's no doubt that people in marketing and web design roles are interested in learning about how personas can help them.
- Lots of questions
I underestimated the time required for my presentation in Tokyo, so I wasn't able to take questions at the end. However, I was delighted to find that audience members brought me some great questions and suggestions during the breaks. I think I spoke to a dozen people from different companies. Some of them were household brands and some were design companies.
- But not much momentum behind personas yet
Several people who came to speak to me during the breaks in Tokyo were just kicking off the first ever persona initiatives within their companies. Similarly, in Osaka, CSK gave a presentation about a pilot project to try out personas. They decided to use personas to guide the redesign of their company's internal portal -- with great results.
I get the impression that most of these initiatives are skunkworks projects - a bit home-made, very underfunded and totally under-the-radar. A handful of people in the company may have a dream of using personas and achieving a user-centric design for their web site or product but they struggle to get the budget to do it. Similarly, the design companies who tell me they'd like to design personas for their clients have a hard time persuading their clients to allocate resources to interview and observe customers.
- So what next?
There's a need to prime the pump -- to create an awareness of personas in Japan -- which is what the persona consortium is doing.
In addition, the topic of personas is now appearing in magazines (Nikkei Communications is currently running a series of articles on the topic) and books. Today, I was delighted to hear from my friend Nobuya Sato at Business Architects. He has just released a Japanese translation of this book:
The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (VOICES) (Paperback)
by Steve Mulder (Author), Ziv Yaar (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/User-Always-Right-Practical-Creating/dp/0321434536
Sato-san's Japanese version is here:
Webサイト設計のためのペルソナ手法の教科書
~ペルソナ活用によるユーザ中心ウェブサイト実践構築ガイド~
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/switch-language/product/4839922349/ref=dp_change_lang/503-1607681-9034349?ie=UTF8&language=en_JP
Please promote this to any of your Japanese friends who want to know more about personas.
I think I will soon have collected enough Japanese persona success stories to write a short report. Some are from professionals and others are "home-made" efforts, put together by a few evangelists as pilot projects to show the value of personas to their colleagues. As such, the final products often look rather less polished than the examples that I see from my colleagues in the US. But it's quite exciting to see the enthusiasm with which the early adopters are describing their successes.
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