January 12th, 2011
This week, Adaptive Path's Todd Wilkins wrote an excellent blog post on Avoiding Half-Baked Personas. In his post, Todd warns design teams that personas based on fiction can lead to misguided design decisions. Todd writes:
I’ve written about the tension between truth and fiction in personas before. In that tension is the power of personas as a design tool but it is also their greatest potential weakness. Too much fiction leads to misguided design. Too little fiction leads to uninspired design.
I spend a lot of my time reminding clients that robust personas won't guarantee a successful design. It's not just about creating the personas. While personas based on real data can vastly improve designs, the real benefit of the persona research is getting members of the team out into the field to observe real users and learn about their context, goals, and desires.
Personas act as a reminder to people about what they learned when observing users out in the field. The important thing teams should remember is that a persona's primary purpose is to communicate what they already learned about users through the research.
In my experience, the process of developing the personas happens after the team has already gained the REAL value from the research: watching users in their natural environment and learning about their context. That's why I encourage all members of the design team to attend at least one session, if not more. Without the team's involvement and participation in the research, even the most robust personas often stagnate, with no one in the organization attending to the research.
When working with clients to develop personas, my goal is to develop personas that are robust. But the most important goal is to establish an ongoing process of gathering user research at the organization. Ideally, organizations reach the point where every member of the design, product, customer support, engineering, and marketing team can say they've had first-hand exposure to a user within the last month.
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October 20th, 2008
I just returned from the highly informative (and fun) User Interface Conference. At the conference, I taught the full-day seminar, Product Usability: Survival Techniques, sharing the results of years of research examining how successful development teams incorporate usability practices into their process. As part of the day, I share several best practices including:
1. Usability test early and often
One of the best ways to prevent launching unusable products is to identify any issues early on in the development process when it’s still simple to make design changes. Yet, many struggling development teams save usability testing for the final stages right before a project launch. Read the rest of this entry »
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July 2nd, 2008
As both a loyal Netflix customer and a Macintosh user, I've always been disappointed that I can't take advantage of Netflix's Watch Instantly feature on my computer. The feature isn't currently supported for the Mac, and for months, I've been asking myself why Netflix has chosen to ignore the needs of a large subset of their audience. Thanks to Netflix, I now know the answer.
When Mac users visit the Watch Instantly page, they can read clear and concise copy that explains why Netflix can't help them watch videos on their computer. They state:
"Our apologies — instant watching is currently not supported for Macintosh.
Our goal is for Netflix members to enjoy movies and TV shows on whatever screen they want. We're required to use Digital Rights Management to protect movies watched instantly online, and right now we only have approval for this protection on Windows Operating systems, not the Mac. Apple does not license their DRM solution to third parties, which has made this more difficult, but we are working with the studios and content owners to gain approval for other solutions."
In addition to the detailed explanation, the page also offers several alternative suggestions for Mac users, so they can try and take advantage of the feature. In my research, when users can't accomplish a task, they still want to understand why they can't do what they want.
In the case of Netflix, one page of online copy effectively helps customers understand that Netflix was considering them — even if they couldn't help them. While Mac users are still inconvenienced, the designers have demonstrated they're thinking about their audience.
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