The persistent persona

I have to admit not getting the fuss about personas. With a raft of new UX books out in recent years, including 2 books on personas in 2006 alone, I am always amused at the extent to which we (in UX, but also in design generally) believe we must re-invent everything. As if its better than some previous generation.

Personas are tools for describing the users attending to the products and services we are designing for. They are basically user profiles, succinct depictions of the salient characteristics of a given user type. Personas capture a set of meaningful properties around a given user categoru, with a name and fictitious background that personalizes it as a representation of a customer.

They have somehow become a big deal. Forrester conducted an international consultant’s study on the best practices in personas in 2007, and now they even offer a persona design course. There are blogs just about personas, such as this one that promotes the Forrester study.

Scott Berkun’s (oops – Joshua Porter’s, of course – and thanks for visiting, that’s one more thing I did not know about you!) So Joshua’s recent discussion about personas (and designing for yourself) spurs my title question, and answers it. I agree with most of what he’s saying, and he outlines a kind of essential history and context of personas which is worth reading, (and if it were in fact the only thing you would read on personas). And he switches from taking on personas as a communication tool within the design team to the notion of the designer finding their own empathy for the user, persona or no-persona. And that essentially designers can design for themselves if so enlightened (which they always have anyway, and often do a very good job if they know the domain). But designers don’t need the personas for themselves – maybe I missed this (it is a long piece) – but designers construct personas for everyone else, and then continue with design work after having wowed the team with their bit of research presented in persona format.

As far as the axioms of designing for yourself, it depends. It seems people in UX are often not trained in Human Factors, or understand the psychology of tacit knowledge. You cannot do knowledge elicitation on yourself, and you cannot measure your own responses to interaction. If you are considering product design, it helps to have separation and empathic understanding. If you are a designer, you are NOT an expert in your user’s work practice, but you can become a kind of participant observer if you are a good researcher. I design for doctors sometimes – I’m not a doctor, but have learned a lot about their work practice and everyday drivers and constraints. So I advocate research-design cycles so that designers can learn over time.

I also quibble with the provenance of Alan Cooper as the formulator of the method. As with everything in UX, there were many historical priors. Cooper only appropriated the the term persona, as part of a best-selling book. We called them User Profiles for many years (those years before Alan transformed from Visual Basic guru to UCD/UX guru). We all adapt tools of the trade. So it seems in UX, everything is new again, all the time. But as kids of the 80’s, some of us “invented” User Profiles because we needed them, and we used them to describe representative users in sufficient detail to support design rationale arguments to developers and product managers. I don’t recall ever using them as major design artifacts though – and they were and are communications tools. To promote them as more seems to demote other methods that we ignore in our attempts to perfect personas. Just look around – How many personas have you seen with well-developed user scenarios describing an ecologically valid use situation? Now that’s something useful.

Sorry to be such a curmudgeon, but that’s what blogs are for. I suggest that the fascination with personas is a way of elevating our methods to an importance they don’t deserve, perhaps just because they are so simple and representative. After all, they are a tool our internal customers in marketing actually understand about our UX deliverables. Try explaining activity theory to them, and framing the user in their context of social activity. They will ask us to stick with the personas, no doubt.

Finally, we should recognize that in order to publish something (like another book or post that promotes personas) we have to create some differences, otherwise there’s no real contribution. But if we have nothing new to say, why print more books about personas? Blogs are a more ecologically sound approach anyway. The fields comprising user experience are starting to feel like electronica genres, with their dozens of nuanced categories that only DJs care about. I know, breakbeat is very different from broken beat, but who cares, if you just want to dance! So let’s dance! (And when you’re in Dayton or Toronto, come dance with us).

Should UX designers advise on revenue models?

Following up on “The Affordable Content Ecosystem.” There are huge opportunities for macro-design that should not be let go without a fight. Essentially, Jaron Lanier’s argument leads to the consideration that our “free web” has become a “free market web” that works for big guys, the content providers, but not for little guys, the artists and inventors. It was not designed that way, it is ecological, as my friend Tarver in Toronto says, “Things are the way they are because they got that way.” Media companies have the footprint to carve our niches in the content ecosystem. As individuals we do not. But as design thinkers, maybe we do, in the form of influencing service design, and something we might call “design for a monetary interaction system.”

Ten years ago J Nielsen predicted and advocated for micropayments, and we all know that did not happen. Perhaps the idea was insufficiently designed and tested. The ecosystem was never seeded with a workable model that could be evaluated over uses and iterated over time. Radiohead’s recent foray into a pay-what-you-can model with In Rainbows showed mixed success – the sheer level of music that “wanted to be free” was overwhelming, and they wound down the experiment. Few bands are as rich as Radiohead, so its unlikely that model will be tried again. However, the mere existence of a micropayment model would make it possible for artists and media companies to try out a wide range of incremental or micro-payment methods. But no large organization wants to be first to break their current business model, even if they barely work in the new era.

Designing a content ecosystem is not like a complex engineering project. It is more like a community agriculture project, requiring numerous patches of cultivation that are tended over seasons and nurtured against the elements and pollutants. As designers, many of us are beholden to the business models of our clients, and we are implicitly – or explicitly – engaged in helping them maximize the impact of their current business model with design thinking. Even if we have evidence that it doesn’t work well. But we somehow believe we can design “experiences” but not “revenue models.” Would it not create a significantly different brand interaction if we considered the revenue system part of the design ecology? How can user experience design influence the reasoning around the value propositions for monetizing content providers?

Designing an affordable content ecosystem

Jaron Lanier speaks up in the (now free Opinion section of the) NY Times about the problematic evolution of free content on the Web. Ten years ago, we all envisioned a brave new world that would open up opportunities for creative people to originate and innovate their work for a fair price. I thought this would happen as well – but the Web has devolved into a consumerist ecosystem paid for by infinite advertising. Jaron asks: “what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated?” The guts of the piece follows:

There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.

To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineers and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way.

We could design information systems so that people can pay for content — so that anyone has the chance of becoming a widely read author and yet can also be paid. Information could be universally accessible but on an affordable instead of an absolutely free basis.

The current and ongoing media writer’s strike has some roots in the same fundamental problem. As media companies move content to the web, and have show snippets moved to YouTube for them, the authors behind the newly mobile content are left out of all negotiations. Whatever content owners can derive from writer’s works they retain, and author rights have not been extended to the repurposed content. While DRM schemes are a heavy-handed control mechanism, they have been designed with “owners” in mind, not originators or inventors. Authors and musicians are largely left out of the deals, and have less motive, not more, to spend their time participating for free. Producing that content takes time and production skill, but also the intangible wonder of talent and inspiration. A libertarian web culture of “information wants to be free – of charge” will be hard to roll back.

How does social networking carry over to organizational behavior?

GK Van Patter recently asked the question:

What is the impact of consciously or unconsciously importing on-line interaction dynamics into organizational cultures?

Is that importation inevitable? How is that importation impacting organizational cultures today?

What do you think? Good question? Where do we start?

Online interaction dynamics might refer to styles of work and time organization, meeting management, distribution of information,structuring of departments and line accountabilities, task assignment and project management, management style. I would suggest all of theseare affected by our experience and learning from social Web interaction. Bonnie Nardi et al wrote in First Monday back in 2000 how organizational knowledge dynamics were changing due to people relying on “intensional networks” for problem-solving versus identifying local experts and contributors in the organization itself. Organizations, as Cluetrain Manifesto aimed for, are becoming more porous and less secretive, extending their knowledge networks through virtual networks of team members.
Another example that comes to mind is how our attention spans in organizational discourse are mediated by the Web multitasking experience. While it may be a blessing that some meetings are shorter now (in product teams due more to Agile than anything else), my experience has been that less ground is covered. I”ve been involved as a consultant in several projects where significant issues are missed and surface later (sometimes months) because of the fragmented, bullet-listing style of meeting and project management. To some extent this may draw from our everyday experience of paying less and less attention to more and more things online. Then carrying over that impatient mindset to the world of F2F social interaction.

One participant made reference to Karen Stephenson’s work in online interaction, trust, and organizations. The finding of how people backstab in competitive environments using BCC to inform undisclosed third parties of their direct discussions with people is a bit disturbing. I’m sure some of this is cultural and perhaps related to organizational size and type as well. Not being an insider anymore, I have little insight into this dynamic – but its a bad trend and one that makes me grateful for being a consultant for hire and not one that has to worry about insider politics.
Personally, I’d prefer the social knowledge network measure of the number and depth of email discussions to external consultants and non-paid advisers. In other words, how often are people in large organizations using their intensional networks for local problem solving?

On Seeing Design as Redesign

Peers in design practice understand the name “Redesign Research,” and get it. At least I think they do. Clients get it as well. And a slogan since 2001 that “All Design is Redesign.” I have found few other designers willing to join me on this – perhaps people think its a marketing slogan, but it really describes a de facto design philosophy. Simply put, design is a set of skills and perspective on problem-solving the wicked problems of ill-formed contexts with structures and materials. The target of design work/thinking is a problem space involving (usually) human activity in a context of work or everyday life. These contexts are pre-existing and carry with them people’s pre-understanding about what’s relevant and useful. Therefore, most design seeks to improve the interactions and materials in these pre-existing contexts. We aim to redesign FROM and TO a space of needs, uses, desires, and affordances. If the context is poorly-framed, you end up with services that fail, marketing with no connection to reality, and products with no markets. Designing to a useful or playful context is redesigning the activities in that context. Designing as redesign, in this sense, is powerful and intentional designing.

Design is not about original invention – most inventions are poorly designed and require incremental improvements to adapt an original vision to a context of use. Such products will fail adoption if the designers miss the opportunity to design for usability and effectiveness. Design is not about innovation either – innovation involves significant disruptive invention or targeted improvements in a meaningful context of activity – their form, materials, usability, and aesthetic values are designed aspects, but not the innovation itself. Innovation is not alway redesign – but design is.

Design Addict published an article earlier this year: On Seeing Design as Redesign: An Exploration of a Neglected Problem in Design Education by Jan Michl. Originally published in the Scandinavian Journal of Design History (2002). Here’s where Michl makes a compelling case for “all design is redesign:”

But although in one way it is correct to say that designers start from nothing, in another sense it is equally correct to maintain that in practice they can never start from scratch. On the contrary, it can be argued that designers always start off where other designers (or they themselves) have left off, that design is about improving earlier products, and that designers are thereby linked, as though by umbilical cord, to earlier objects, or more correctly to their own or their colleagues’ earlier solutions – and thus to yesterday. In other words, what the word design holds back is the entire co-operative and past-related dimension in designing that makes designers’ individual creative contributions possible. Nor does the word design satisfactorily capture the fact that design activity is never really complete with the final product because all products are by nature makeshift solutions, and as such can always be improved.

Then there’s ReDesign Design as well …

 

2Collaboration with Elsevier

Beta launch of 2collab – Elsevier’s new social bookmarking and networking tool has been released in Beta. I’ve registered and started tagging some articles – I’m finding it very simple to get in and working with it. Try it out yourself and see –

On June 26, the beta version of 2collab was launched to the Scopus and ScienceDirect Development Partners. 2collab is a new collaborative research tool that enables researchers to share bookmarks, references or any linked materials with their peers and colleagues. Users can share, collaborate and discuss resources either in private groups or openly with the wider scientific community.

A common scenario involves a researcher writing an article with co-authors around the globe. Using 2collab he/she can store and share information resources such as research articles centrally so colleagues can access them. Bookmarks can be tagged to allow new ways of searching and accessing information. In addition, researchers can comment, rate and evaluate these resources in their groups. This makes collaboration more efficient and helps researchers share, connect and explore. All without the need for long and complex email strings!

“2collab beta is just the starting point,” says Michiel van der Heyden, Senior Product Manager, ScienceDirect. “We plan to create a platform that allows researchers across the globe not just to collaborate on evaluating information but also to help them build new networks, share expertise, and discover new information resources. And we gain from having an opportunity to observe and learn from their behavior.”

While I realize Elsevier’s ScienceDirect and Scopus are the flagship services here, 2Collab would seem to be a great fit with Scirus. Since 2Collab tags open resources that others can locate from your tags, Scirus’ indexing across open science resources would be a good for the early discovery stages of lit research.  Also, Scirus recommends terms to you drawn from the search results. I know tagging is supposed to be user-specified, but the idea is to use meaningful tags recognized by other users – Scirus has a great index already from its (linked) suggested terms.  How about an icon to display Scirus terms accessible to 2Collab?

Procedures Consult – Immersive experience in rich content

Nothing but medical procedures. No tagging, no RSS feeds, no social networking. (Not yet anyway.) The innovation was in discovering exactly what was required for the intensive education of doctors in residency programs, delivering these capabilities and minimizing all other distractions. Here the user experience is in the transparent immersion in the details of anatomy, positioning, approach and entry points, techniques, and simulations of all the internal parts you never could see even with live patients.
Elsevier released ProceduresConsult this month, to institutional subscribers. This e-learning service provides animated and acted video and text details for common internal medicine procedures, so you can learn to do arthrocentesis at home. (Hopefully, only if you are in a residency program). Medical residents in internal medicine (and soon Orthopedics and Anethseia will be able to locate detailed interactive procedures education with extraordinary video produced by Harvard’s Dr. Todd Thomsen.

Both 320 (on-page) and 640 (video player) videos are provided for every procedure. Text is shown in two full-scrollable pages, Quick Review and Full Details. Navigation was based on how residents typically work with one procedure at a time – while you can search, browse and jump around, the nav model focuses attention within the procedure and limits the opportunity to link away from the page.

We started on this service from nearly scratch 10 months ago, and leveraged an existing platform (based on Elsevier’s Nursing Skills product) to deliver the testing and tracking capabilities rapidly. The interaction design was totally drawn from user research, from multiple interactions with physicians and residency program staff. The content design was generated in collaborative design with the product manager (the indefatigable Rolla Couchman), Dr. Thomsen, and the product and editorial team. We conducted multiple onsite user research sessions, evaluating the site structure and navigation, visual and interaction design, content layout, video interaction, and administrative tools in a series of iterations and increasingly-defined prototypes. Jez Alder of Elsevier produced the visual design, over multiple iterations. Look for navigation and content enhancements soon.