A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz’s thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations.

Let’s begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in a heartbeat: The worst possible way to employ user personas in a design process is for the designers themselves to have no role in the creation of the persona documents themselves.

Or to put it another way: It sucks when the creator of the research artifacts is not also the designer of the product. If personas are created by a specialized “research team” and then handed off to a specialized “design team”, that design team doesn’t actually experience the substantive benefits good personas can provide.

This is true because, in my view, the primary benefit from creating personas is bestowed upon those who actually make the artifacts, via the thinking, collaboration, and conversations that occur during their creation. The best insights emerge during the investigations and discussions about the data.

Typically we think of a research-based design process being boiled down to a simple equation: “research + design”. I think this model is too simplistic. To me, there are three steps, not two, in any good research-driven design process. Between researching users and designing a product there is an additional critical step, something we all do but don’t recognize as a distinct stage in the design process: research interpretation.

The creation of compelling and useful research artifacts, whether personas or modemaps, mood boards or mental models, is a process of interpreting plain data into meaningful structures and systems that are sensible and useful to designers. It is a synthetic and analytic process at the same time. It’s a creative process. It is a design process.

The Second Step

Let’s look at these three components or stages in a research-driven design process, in particular the second step:

1. Gather research data
2. Interpret the research
3. Produce the design

Ideally all three steps would be conducted by the same team, with the same individuals doing the data collection, documentation, and design work. This is easy when the whole team is made up of skilled designers with good research skills.

But on some projects good user research doesn’t yet exist. Someone will need to conduct surveys, observe users, run tests and analysis, interview domain specialists, and do all kinds of of direct, primary research.

Meanwhile on other projects the research may already exist, in great quality and quantity. The only real research necessary is for the design team to ingest these pre-existing reports and data into their design process.

In either case, however, the second step needs to be taken. Somebody needs to transform the data into something that lays the groundwork for the design.

Getting Creative with Research isn’t a Bad Thing

For example, when we create personas we make editorial decisions about how many different types of users we will define. We may choose to represent several types of users in our group of personas. As an example, let’s say for a news web site we define the following four primary personas based on how dedicated they are to visiting the web site:

• The Temporary Visitor
• The Occasional Repeat Visitor
• The New Subscriber
• The Long-Term Subscriber

Does this breakdown of users not immediately suggest a navigation scheme or a UI design model? Doesn’t it seem likely that all four of these user types will want their needs addressed in some explicit way on the web site, something that manifests itself in a big way in the final design?

But what if we chose to define them this way instead, focusing on their content desires rather than on their devotion to the site?:

• The Sports Fan
• The Political Junkie
• The Concerned Parent
• The Well-Rounded Person

Would this alternate way of thinking of users and of interpreting the data not have a fundamentally different effect on the subsequent UX design process? Wouldn’t the resulting designs be different from the design that came from the first set of personas? The data behind these personas may be the same, but the effect of the interpretation of that data on the rest of the design process may be profound.

There are many other ways, of course, to structure a set of research-informed user personas from the same underlying data. My contention is that this process of transforming data is right on the edge, and maybe over it, of being a design process. Sometimes a dataset may reveal clear design solutions (if 30% of your users speak only Spanish, you may want a link to en español somewhere pretty obvious), but more often than not these kinds of structures are far from obvious in the data. Usually it demands creativity and abductive thinking.

Todd Zaki Warfel likes the phrase “Data Driven Design“. I prefer Data Inspired Design. Data-driven implies that the best design solutions are inferred from or deduced from the data, like Michaelangelo removing David from a block of marble. I don’t think design happens that way, even when data is deeply integrated in the design process. In my mind, the data exists to inspire the designers to new ideas, to point them generally in the right direction towards a solution. Not to provide the solution outright.

This is where interpretation comes in. Interpretation and inspiration. This is the magical part of great design, the part where being a good researcher isn’t enough and where being a good designer isn’t enough. It’s where the designer understands research, and where the researcher understands design.

To be a good designer or a good design researcher, you must master the second step of interpretation.

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A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term “Getting Things Done” always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It’s the passive voice.

Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb “to get”, maybe we really should simply say “Doing Things“. GTD isn’t about getting other people to do things — it’s about you doing things. Even delegation is something you have to actively do.

Or, as Nike said, “Just Do It” (an expression that adman Dan Weiden now says he thought up after reading Gary Gilmore’s last words as he faced a firing squad).

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I’m not going to say much about Kindle — as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb.

But the breathless excitement over the supposed “death of the book” is even more preposterous than Amazon’s little white elephant, especially to book lovers like my wife and me. For us, books, periodicals, and printed matter of all sorts comprise, quite literally, the very structure of both our intellectual and physical worlds. Books surround us. Our loft is subdivided into rooms using bookshelves. Every surface has a stack of hardbacks, paperbacks, and magazines on it. We both grew up surrounded by the printed word — looking at them, feeling them, smelling them — and we intend for our family to continue in that tradition.

Books are the building blocks of libraries, and our libraries reflect who we are. John Gruber’s critique of Kindle as a profound rip-off for true book lovers is spot on:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Here’s a far better idea, one that book lovers who also happen to be technophiles would love: Bundle print and digital copies of books together for the same price, perhaps as a very small cost increase (say 5%) to the basic print price. You can think of it as a free digital backup copy, or as a digital reference edition. Other advantages include:

• Scholars, journalists, and reviewers can use the digital copy for searches, citations, quotations, and literary analysis.
• References to external sources can be clickable URLs.
• Since so many digital book owners print them out, the bundling will inevitably save a few trees.
• Having a digital copy precludes the need to print an index in the physical book. There’s no need to even construct one in the first place — let users simply search it digitally.
• While I still think DRM is evil, it wouldn’t be quite so onerous as long as a physical copy was in my permanent posession.

John Gruber includes this fabulous Emerson quote in his review:

If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books.

Many of the core lifestyle and business ideas behind Kindle are, frankly, an affront to what I love about books. What is most surprising is seeing Amazon — of all companies! — treating book lovers in this way. This is not innovative thinking at all.

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Leisa Reichelt coined the term “ambient intimacy” to describe the genre of social computing apps led by Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. She was interested in the constant sense of closeness users feel with their circle of friends, no matter how far-flung, through technologies that informally reveal us to each other.

Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku (and newly minted Googleplexian), called this phenomenon “peripheral vision”, your ability to informally or even unconsciously know what’s going on in your social circle.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that my Twitter stream contains a lot more than just what people are doing. They’re starting to use Twitter to express their emerging ideas and to begin tentative conversations about things they are thinking about.

In fact, even as I enjoy the ambient intimacy of having the incidental knowledge about what my friends are doing, I’m finding that the sharing of ideas is the most valuable part of Twitter. My Twitter friends send links to interesting sites, they announce their latest blog posts, and they talk about the new ideas they are reading about and hearing about, usually at the moment they first experience the idea. Or they’ll ask a provocative question (”Does anyone use friendster anymore?”) and see what it generates.

But most exciting of all is when someone shouts out their own half-baked idea (in 140 characters or less), and the rest of the group piles on to shape the idea further. Spontaneous “collective musing” occurs. This whole process is over in only a few minutes, and then the whole dialogue fades away into the ether. The ideas, however, live on in our heads, and eventually some even take more concrete form.

The Twitter medium allows these informal and impromptu communications to occur in a way that, for example, posting to a mailing list, publishing a blog post, or posting a question to a Q&A social site can never quite do. It’s something just a little bit less than a conversation.

In the same vein, Bruce Nussbaum today quotes Roger Martin from the Rotman School of management, who says “Blogging is intellectual prototyping.” If that’s the case, then Twitter is intellectual doodling.

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Designers of interactive products and services are having more and more influence on how businesses work, providing guidance that goes go far beyond layouts, flows, grids, colors, and movement — ideas that are fundamentally more that just look and feel. We are helping businesses understand and solve broader challenges, helping them define their core feature offerings, choosing their technology platforms, collecting performance metrics, devising advertising models, and much more.

And I completely agree that designers have a lot to offer with respect to many business strategies that go beyond core visual and interactive design questions. But too often we lump these broader business concerns under the single sexy umbrella term “strategy” without really thinking about what that word really means for a business.

Strategic Defense

Too often, “strategy” is just a sloppy shorthand for the general idea that designers need to understand the business demands and challenges their clients and bosses face. Which is a great and noble objective: I completely agree that designers need to take more responsibility for the big picture around the products we build, not just focusing on pixels and HTML.

But we have to be realistic about the limits of that extended scope of responsibility. Let’s not get too full of ourselves here. A great many absolutely critical aspects of a company’s business strategy have little to do with design at all:

• Operational Strategy: Physical infrastructure (furniture, utilities, amenities) for the corporate offices, maintenance and cleaning of the facility, rents and insurance, even the corporate office’s location…
• Financial Strategy: Accounting and cash flow management, tax preparation, collections, investment management…
• Human Resources Strategy: What kinds of people are needed, how much to pay employees, benefits packages, recruitment efforts, training and conferences, building staff versus leveraging consultants…
• Legal Strategy: Trademarks, patents, copyrights, insurance…
• Marketing/Sales Strategy: What should the product or service cost? How and where should the company advertise? Should the company offer loss-leader services? Will the product be supported by fees or through advertising? If advertising, who should the target advertisers be?
• Corporate Strategy: Mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, positioning for selling/flipping the business, IPO strategies, investor relations, raising capital.

A company can literally succeed or fail based on the wisdom of a single decision in any one of these fundamental strategic business areas. How many small businesses have failed because they signed an expensive long-term lease? How many great products have disappeared because they didn’t cover their ass with a simple patent search? No matter how great a product’s design might be, all too often it’s the basic, boring operational and accounting strategies that become the real make-or-break business success factors.

But how many of these business questions should a user experience designer address when consulting a client or helping their employer with their “business strategy”?

Very few, I think. A business strategy is what people who actually run businesses worry about every day — so unless you are part of company management, a top-level management consultant, or a venture capitalist with direct control over company management, your purview will almost certainly be limited to some subset of a business’s overall strategy. This is not to say that all of these factors are irrelevant or off limits to designers. But most of them are.

Many will argue that all of the above topics can and should simply be seen as aspects of a holistic capital-D “Design”. Conceptually I want to agree… but realistically I simply cannot agree: Few designers have the experience or training to offer the kind of specialized consulting required to be credible or helpful in almost all of these fields. In short, “business strategy” is more than design.

Why this is Important

I was once in a group discussion at a design conference where the topic was “business strategy”. After about 15 minutes of listening quietly, it struck me that everyone in the room had a different idea of what the topic really was. Some thought it was about how to start or run a business, others thought it was about how to provide ROI metrics for design services, and still others thought it was about how designers can and should learn more about how their clients’ businesses actually work. When I asked the group what we were talking about, I got a lot of blank stares and some people admitted that maybe we weren’t sure but hey, the discussion was interesting anyway.

So can I ask a favor? Can we designers all please stop using the word “strategy” without preceding it with a specific adjective? As in “design strategy”, “marketing strategy”, “customer acquisition strategy”, etc. Let’s be very clear about what we’re talking about when we extend our responsibilities beyond what they taught us in design school. We do have a great deal to say in many aspects of business strategy, but not even by a long shot can we claim a right to play a role in all of them.

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In a recent interview, Michael Beirut noted that wine labels are one of the purest branding experiences: All wine bottles contain the same basic product (wine), so if you don’t know anything about a particular bottle of wine the graphic design of the label and the shape of the bottle are quite often the only methods you have (besides whatever knowledge you might have of the intricate and faceted namespace of wine metadata) to decide whether or not you should buy that Burgundy.

In other words, packaging is a fundamental part of the overall customer experience (aka the user experience). Whether contemplating, holding, carrying, opening, or unpacking a product, it’s “packaging” is everything between (a) the time the customer didn’t even know they wanted it to (b) the first moment actually using what they’ve bought.

And the best (and worst) practices of physical product packaging are, I think, applicable to the digital/virtual product user experience, too.

Here’s an example from the physical world: The other night I opened a bottle of Rioja with a rather unorthodox cork, and I was reminded again of just how much the experience of merely opening a product is one of the most powerful opportunities available to a user experience designer.

The Rioja’s actual cork was perfectly traditional and conventional, but the plastic seal enveloping it so closely hugged the bottle’s lip, and was made of such stiff, thick plastic, that it took me several profanity-laden minutes to finally wrestle the plastic seal from the cork. The whole time my excitement about tasting this new wine turned into resentment towards the brand. A perfectly good branding opportunity utterly ruined by thoughtless user experience design.

Hostile Packaging

Sometimes packaging goes from mere thoughtlessness to downright hostility towards the customer. The day after the Rioja nightmare, I purchased a new USB PCI card for my computer, and was again confronted with a packaging nightmare.

Yes, it’s one of those dreaded clamshell blister packs deliberately designed, it seems, to slice customers’ hands open. I at first took the product here just to show another familiar example of user-unfriendly packaging. But then I started opening it and the example proved itself spectacularly. I tried scissors and an X-acto knife before I finally had to grab a powerful box cutter to cut through the steel-like plastic.

Look, I’m fairly skilled with my hands. I majored in sculpture in college, for crying out loud. How in the world do people without my kind of skills, and presumably without the necessary cutlery tools, actually open these packages without cutting themselves in the process?

Turns out the answer to that question is moot: I cut my finger opening the package — which suggests to me that a very large percentage of other customers must do the same. Is this possible? Can a brand survive when their products spill their customers’ blood? Apparently so, since this packaging is still in wide use. But do I have anything positive to say about these brands? Nope.

In fact, it’s probably no coincidence that I cannot even name any brand whose products come in this style of packages. If holding and opening a new product is a branding moment, shouldn’t opening that product be an opportunity for me to feel good about the brand? Instead of me writing them off as no-name, second-tier junk?

Compare these packaging nightmares/experiences to (naturally) any Apple product, where the box is easy to open, the first exposure to the item itself feels like a revelation, and most importantly the product itself can be touched and admired within seconds.

There’s even a word for this: unboxing. Technology review sites like Engadget and Gizmodo make sure to specifically evaluate the unboxing experience as part of their overall product reviews. In fact, many consumers are so enamored by the unboxing experience of their products that they have created web communities centered around sharing their unboxing experiences with the world, often in obsessive compulsive detail.

Opening the Software Bottle

It’s easy to imagine how these very different modes of thinking about the hardware customer experience translates into interactive and software user experience design. There are just as many risks to absolutely ruin your customer’s experience through careless design, and there are just as many opportunities to enhance the experience, and your brand, through deliberate positive experience designs.

• Is the product easy to install?
• Is the sign-up or registration process easy?
• Does the setup process actually make you excited to start using the product?
• How quickly can you actually start using the product in your life?
• What risks must you take (with your time and your privacy) to get set up? Does the setup process feel intrusive on your privacy or your finances?
• How quickly can you complete your first intended task (e.g., create your first document or make your first phone call)?

Think of your next interactive user experience design as analogous to designing a piece of hardware that comes in a box — and then imagine that you have the power to design the box.

Or imagine that your web site is a bottle of wine, and that the first user’s visit is like uncorking the bottle: Now design the bottle.

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In this final chapter of Pronoun vs. Pronoun (see previous chapters User vs. You, User vs. Tron, and You vs. I), we will now weigh in on the great schism between Me and You.

Almost every web design team I’ve ever worked with has had to, at some point, wrestle with the “Me vs. You” question. In this great debate, the winner was You over at YouTube and YouSendIt.com, and many years ago You won at U-Haul. But the winner was Me over at MyYahoo!, and at MySpace, and at countless other personalized “my.foo.com” sites.

This debate between Me and You, or My and Your, comes up whenever we try to name a personalization feature, or when we need a name the part of the site where personalization appears, or whenever we want to communicate directly to the user in a conversational way. How shall we, the designers, address the user when speaking to them this way? Is the user the “other”, an external, second person with respect to the site or the company, or to the site’s designers? Shall I address the user conversationally as “you”?, or should we try to keep the user distant and only use the third person?

Or does this “conversation” between the web site and You feel a little distant, impersonal, maybe even a little phony? I mean, it’s not like Amazon.com is a sentient person who can actually talk to us. You’re reading computer generated text about your books, your account. Maybe some site designers feel as if the site’s voice should be your voice, as if you were talking to yourself. (e.g., “This is my site!)

It seems like You is used for conversational or imperative modes of communication, while My is often used for nomenclature and branding. Frequently-asked-questions are also usually told with My voice (”How do I format my Windows hard Drive?”), while instruction manuals are generally addressed directly to You.

Product designers, copywriters, and information architects will argue about this forever, but we get really agitated when we see Me and You alternating on the same page!

Thank you for being a Beta user for My Times? Wait, whose Times is it? Is it My Times, or is it Your Times?

Of course, the worst is when computers refer to themselves in the first person. Unless the computer is a certified Turing Test-winning AI, I’m not comfortable with a machine acting like a person through the use of human pronouns. Machines should never use the pronoun me to refer to itself.

As far as I am concerned, the only products that should be allowed to refer to themselves in the first person are made by Apple and begin with the lower case letter i.

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Ceci n’est pas les useurs. (Is the use of little iconic, anonymous, faceless, android-like icons even more dehumanizing than using the word “user”?)

There’s a huge debate going on in the UX community about the use of the word “user”. Some argue that the word demeans the people we are trying to help, that it distances us from them, and that it makes us unable to truly empathize with their wants and needs. Words like “people” and “humans” are suggested instead, reminding us that our users are, in fact, human beings just like us.

I am at best bemused by the arguments, honestly. They feel a little phony, like a way for traditional usability and HCI folks — or marketing people for that matter — to feel or appear a little more folksy and less clinical about their approach to understanding their, um, users. Calling them by a new, friendly-sounding name seems like an effort to undo a possble perception that one may be out of touch with the emerging power of social media and user(oops, I did it again)-generated content.

Jim Drew on the IxDA List said it best, I think:

I find the push to avoid “user” as parallel to referring to employees as “cast members” or any of the other terms which seem clever the first time and make you roll your eyes thereafter. Some weird combo of branding and political correctness.

Does replacing “the user” with “the person” really an improvement? Does using “the person” endear the user (or person) to a product’s designers any better? Does the word “people” engender more empathy than the word “users”? I don’t think so. To me “the person” is equally dull and abstract than user. It’s more awkward and contrived, too — I mean, who actually talks that way?

Besides, the word “user” is a perfectly decent and useful word for when you want to describe an interaction design in a general sense, such as when describing the way a combo box works. I intend to keep using it. I also intend to use other words whenever they are more relevant and appropriate, such as “customer”, “player”, “reader”, “viewer”, “employee”, “renter”, or whatever other term most accurately describes the person or type of person I am talking about.

I call this kind of description “engagement specificity” — articulating the user’s mode of engagement by using the correct word to describe that engagement’s fundamental nature. This is basic English here: just use the right words at the right time, and don’t resort to buzzwords and catchy truisms. In other words, let’s simply try to write accurately and write well.

And besides, we already have the perfect word, and we use it every day in our informal conversations: It’s you.

The Second Person

When describing how to use something to a friend, you (there I did it) will usually say things like “You press the button on the top, then you slide your finger across the slider at the bottom” or “You enter your name and password in the upper left corner”. This is how we already talk about user experiences and indeed about almost anything descriptive, and it is an immensely empathetic manner of speaking. It is the linguistic manifestation of pure empathy: Me imagining what it’s like to be you, and describing my own knowledge through your eyes and actions, using (in literary terms) the second person perspective.

But the weird thing is that we hardly ever write this way, especially not professionally. In fact, in contemporary writing the second person is limited almost exclusively to Choose Your Own Adventure books. The construction has a juvenile, unsophisticated ring to it. It’s seen by many as overly informal, treating the reader a little too familiarly and casually.

But what if we wrote our documentation with the word “You” instead of all of those other euphemisms for users? A very compelling interface specification technique, suggested by Don Norman among others, is to write the user’s manual first: Document all the features as if you were writing the final instructions for the end user, then build the product described in this pre-emptive manual:

Want to know what designers of manuals should do? They should design and write the manual before the product is designed. Make the manual simple and elegant. Then insist that the designers build it the way they have described it. Then we might actually get usable products. and simple manuals.

The best designed products won’t even need manuals.

And why not take this method one step further: Before designing anything, write the product’s manual in the second person as if you were simply speaking informally to a friend about how to use the product, or describing how it works to a colleague or a family member?

I may try this on an upcoming project. Should be interesting, at least.

(Next User vs. Tron)

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