Chapter 9. Designing for Pleasure
By: Alan Cooper
Universal Methods of Design - Personas (pgs. 132 - 133)
By: Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington
After reading Alan Cooper's article about personas, I have a new understanding of how important it is to have a certain person in mind. He mentioned that "having people love your product, even if it is only a minority, is how you succeed." Designing for a specific person will guide you in the right direction. If you always keep in mind what this specific persona would want out of your product, it will make for a better product. Even if the design is for the 10% of a group, if that group absolutely loves the product, they will talk with their friends and may influence others to buy into the product. Although it wasn't initially designed for the other part of the group, they may get some use out of it. Later on down the line, more products can be made with similar goals, but different personas in mind.
This is similar to the roll-aboard suitcases designed mainly for flight attendants. When other consumers noticed how beneficial it was to have this product, they jumped on board and wanted the same, or similar product. Most people don't know what their needs are until they see a better solution. Soon after, different styles of roll-aboard suitcases were created to provide for different people. Again, people talk to friends and family of a great product, which expands the amount of consumers.
I also enjoyed the idea of giving a name and picture to your personas. This is very important to create empathy with your persona and have the ability to put yourself in their shoes. By being specific (what their abilities -power users, computer-literate users, and naive users- are, the car they drive, their income, lifestyle, family, and job) it makes it even easier to trade places with your persona.
Cooper mentions that it is "more important that a persona be precise than accurate... (that) it is more important to define the persona in great and specific detail than that the persona be the precisely correct one." However, I wonder if in creating a specific persona, the whole design goal falls off topic and the client you were designing for becomes unhappy. How is it possible to pick a persona that we know will solve the client's goals? Or is the idea of a persona to completely reinvent and redesign the initial product? Having never created a persona before, I find it difficult to choose what kind of person would be using my product. I know that later he describes in detail different scenarios with the in-flight interactive screen, but he had much more time to research and pull together facts from interviews. How is it possible for a designer (like our class) to come up with a persona without having prior research of our audience? Will we be as successful creating our own "ideal persona" that we think fits our product? Cooper also talks about if "...a persona (is) very close to the center, that persona should be shunted out of consideration." I'm not quite sure what he is referring to, and I think we could explore that in tomorrow's discussion.
Later in the article, considering the IT manager's needs comes into play. Ideally, we as designers should/need to consider the persona first, and the IT managers second. However, most times IT managers think they know what their audience wants, and drive the entire design process. I wonder, how do we know who is more right? If we have no previous knowledge of the topic we are designing for, how can we tell what the persona may or may not want? If this design process is similar to what we are doing in class now, I can see that the concept map would already be made and developed, and therefore, the designer should have a good understanding of the product. If that is the case, then I think there can be some debate between the IT manager and the designer about what the persona really wants out of the product.
Universal Methods of Design - Personas
The second reading out of the Univ. Methods of Design book pretty much summed up what Cooper described in his article. Creating a persona simplifies the product goal, and is important in designing a successful product. Research in the field is the best way to find common ground between a larger group, and makes it easier to create 3 to 5 different personas to use for a project. By diagramming these tendencies, it makes it easier to see where everyone falls under a similar category.
Personas should be no more than one page length, to avoid getting too detailed. Again, a name, photograph or sketch, and a narrative (life situation, goals, and behaviors relevant to the design) are all needed in creating a successful and USEFUL persona. Other images to help further describe the persona can be used as well. These can help describe their lifestyle, such as their activities, living spaces, and items they may have.
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