I find it most useful to deliberately recruit people with and without experience of the task in question. This provides a rich contrast between users: specifically, the needs of experts and the needs of learners. I have found this more productive when it comes to thinking about design issues than to be comparing, say, the differing needs of women or men; or 40-somethings and 50-somethings.

You can go further than this and segment people with differing levels of experience of the task in question: so go for some with lots of experience (e.g. daily), some with occasional experience (done it a few times in the last year). This provides more quality insights: people recall daily experiences with greater accuracy than those who are remembering what they did six months ago; people who have only done something a few times usually show what is memorable (and forgettable) about the experience of the task in question.

There is definitely something interesting here, as we are finding out in our work!

I think that some online propositions are so broad in terms of demographics that it makes very little sense to use the “pen pictures” approach as marketing and business folk will always say “but what about *this* type of customer…?” This doubt can lead to a lack of credibility for personas as a design tool.

Nevertheless it has been tricky to rationalise the approach to the numbers of groups and to adequately prioritise their commercial importance for decision making purposes. Like I have said, this is a journey rather than a silver bullet type scenario – as a client team there needs to be a way to develop and build knowledge about using personas and about how our customers behave. It’s a process of refinement over time.

Perhaps the ultimate recruitment tool would be some way to link on-site analytics which flags up patterns of behaviour and provides a list of users from which to recruit. This would reduce the risk of the hit and miss nature of the telephone screener…
We have been talking about setting up an “expert panel” of users from which we can recruit.

@Mike
I think my experience is that the ‘fun’ parts of the persona can also prove to be their weakest spot. People tend to obsess about the persona photo and the other more easily assimilated bits of info and this steers people’s thinking away from ‘user behaviour’. It’s ironic because the behaviour is precisely what personas are designed to provoke thinking about!

However I think you have got something – the way in which you label the groups is important imo. If the labels are too clever-clever I think you easily lose people. This is an area which is about effective communication more than anything else. You need to make sure that you are bringing people with you in baby steps rather than drowning people in airy-fairy esoterica.

DJ

Those details you refer too are not supposed to be taken literally they are to help those working on a project/site have a mental picture of an otherwise faceless customer. Yes it may seem corny at times but it has been proven to help make the behaviour groups more memorable.

If the persona is derived and communicated effectively they should be task based anyway(demographics are rarely brought into a persona as a defining factor). Do you not think that by removing the ‘fun’ parts of a persona you could be jeopardising their acceptance, as the “behaviour groups” end up being given a name which isn’t easy to relate too on an emotional level as it comes across as UX ‘jargon’, e.g. ‘Savvy Savers’?