Hello Persona Builders,
My name is Tim Smalley and I set up personasBuilder back in June 2008 as part of one of my final University projects (my life as a tax dodging student is long since over).
Since leaving University, my colleagues and I have been focussing our efforts on setting up our own user-centered design business, which consequently means personasBuilder has been left by the wayside. However thanks to Steve Mulder and his blog Practical Personas, personasBuilder has seen a steady stream of new users registering and making use of my creation.
Recently the user total has reached 300! This is great news and I want to offer a huge thank you to everyone, whether you just tried it out or you’re using it on a daily basis.
Checking over the Google Analytics, we’ve seen personasBuilder is also coming up for some good related keywords, “creating personas”, which hopefully means there’s demand out there for a web application like personasBuilder to flourish.
So why choose now to start the blog? Well…
1. I’ve got no hard and fast way of knowing whether personasBuilder is meeting the requirements and demands of its users - so now you have a place to leave your feedback, please feel free to comment and let me know your views. If there’s enough demand for new features and suggestions, we’ll get them implemented.
2. The app is over a year old and never really came out of beta. There are quite few bugs in there and I am sure you all have spotted at least one or two. For the time being, post your bug reports here and fixing them will be top priority.
3. I have always intended personasBuilder to remain free and that isn’t going to change. However, I’d like to test the water and propose a premium package - this would be by means of a small monthly charge that would enable more concurrent projects and greater suppport for file uploads. What are your opinions on this? I’d love to hear your feedback!
4. The way in which different teams/groups/companies use personas is amazing and hopefully this blog could act as hub for people explaining how they go about creating personas and sharing their process/documents/methods. Who knows?
That’s all for now - I know that I’m keen to get things moving again and turn personasBuilder into a community driven online resource and that can’t happen without your help. If you have any opinions, comments, suggestions, complaints or praise, post them here!
All the best,
Tim Smalley