Spotlighted in the middle of an interesting article about how storytelling can create better user experiences in Smashing Magazine is a friend of Fuzzy Math, William Creech.
We aren’t exactly sure how Smashing Magazine found William for the article, but there he is in all his glory within the “Defining the user” section. William Creech is a persona that Mark created for our first app, code name Ranger, that Mark (and Fuzzy Math) has been working on for the past few months. We use him, a primary persona for the project, as the target user for the application. Having a “real” person we can design towards helps to keep us all on the same page when we are working on features, page layouts, or really any other aspect of the application.
Coming back to the article, we love that our work was picked up and used as an example, especially something like a persona, which we really believe in and use on almost every project we work on. It is also great that it was picked up by a place like Smashing Magazine, which we all enjoy reading.
In fact, I keep a list of links I like on my desktop in a text file called “notes.txt” (hello 1996!), and there are no less than thirteen Smashing Magazine links in there. Here is one from the way-back machine that I like a lot. Smashing Magazine is good stuff. Check it out (especially the article we are mentioned in).