[IxDA Discuss] New IxD Techniques to Try in 2007

[Robert Barlow-Busch]

> >So in the web application, we built numerous ways for them to deal
> >with interruptions.
> If studying the activity means studying the people, then by all  
> means, study the people. (*IF* you have time, that is. In my  
> experience, you rarely have time unless you work for a UX firm.)

Hmm, good food for thought. Honestly, we could have studied only the  
activity here: it's a web app, so data was available; the job is  
dictated in many ways by corporate policies and workflows; general  
standards and approaches to project management are easy to find, so  
we could have merely encoded best practices.

But had we done that, we'd have totally missed out on some "aha!"  
moments, such as the impact of interruptions on the job.

And BTW, yeah, we're a UX firm, as a data point to support Robert H's  
theory. <grin>

> But at what point did it become vital to create personas -  
> archetypal users - to help your design work? And why? And in what  
> way did the personas help you? You already knew your users were  
> very busy people, so why was a persona necessary? Did you need them  
> to convince other people your users were busy? Did you need them to  
> justify your design work? Was it a political decision?

As I mentioned yesterday, the real value of this exercise is in the  
*discovery* of key insights. It was our field work here that really  
mattered; the personas were simply a way to share what we learned. So  
why personas? It's true that we could have communicated the findings  
another way.

First of all, by crafting a set of characters, people who weren't  
involved in the field research could have a crystal-clear picture in  
their mind of that typically vague term "the user". As a result, they  
felt empathy -- and I caution against underestimating the value of  
this. I believe it was the power of character and narrative that  
helped our client commit to new features such as those for dealing  
with interruptions.

Typical of this sort of work, the resulting insights weren't just a  
mashup of stuff we learned; patterns were discernable. Personas are a  
good way to illustrate those patterns. Even if we hadn't created  
personas as such, it would have been critical to present our findings  
according to pattern A, pattern B, and so on. The main difference  
between this and a persona is the format: assigning an identity and  
producing a narrative. Other people can argue the power of character  
and narrative better than me, so I'll leave it to them. :-)

What is it that marks "great design"? In large part, I believe it's a  
sense of elegant cohesion; the parts fit together beautifully into a  
whole that makes sense -- and even if we're not squarely in the  
target audience, we can still recognize this elegance. IMHO, personas  
are useful because they are themselves elegantly coherent and  
therefore useful as tools to help inform our decisions about design.

Note I said *inform* design, not *specify*. Personas shouldn't  
dictate design decisions, just as users/customers shouldn't.

Great discussion! I absolutely agree that "personas" has become too  
much of a buzzword, and I typically rebel against anything that  
reaches that status. But I've had far more success with personas than  
failures, so I'm jumping to their defense anyway.

-- 
Robert Barlow-Busch
Practice Director, Interaction Design
Quarry Integrated Communications Inc.
rbarlowbusch at quarry.com
(519) 570-2020

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