My favourite UX guru, Barbara Ballard, wrote some useful comments on my recent ‘thinking about the mobile experience‘ post. I am grateful for her feedback and drawing my attention to the use of personas in the product design process.

I have all kind of reservations about the effective use of personas, but, like all these things, they are just tools in the toolkit. They are there to serve the design process and may or may not be useful depending on the circumstances. The more that companies talk about and attempt so-called ‘agile processes,’ the more it seems to boil down to being hyper-pragmatic about running with what you’ve got and using the right tool at the right time. We shouldn’t end up being servants to the tools. I can certainly make good use of a chisel in carving out a masterpiece, but only if it’s what we needed in the first place.

Just to be clear, in the original posting, I was being deliberately provocative about the use of the first person (”I”) in capturing user tasks. The audience that I am used to dealing with frequently talk about users in a very functional sense. Part of what distinguishes experience from mere usage of a product, is the emotional content - how it feels to use the product. Moreover, we should also talk about things like the ‘idle experience,’ which is what it feels like NOT to use the product - what it’s absence feels like. Thinking about the ‘whole experience’ is part of designing a ‘whole product’ and there’s lots we could discuss about how to do this. It’s extremely difficult.

In my workshops, we first use ‘I’ to create a set of potential user tasks rapidly - ‘I can open my front door using my mobile phone’ in a recent workshop. We then role play using ‘personas,’ so that we end up with ‘I can open my front door without my parents knowing,’ or ‘I can let my maid open the front door’ and other interpretations of the same basic task fall out of the process. You can guess the personas here. If we think we have user data available here, then we can attempt ‘reality’ role playing or we can even ask real users.

As this is still ideation, we also role play with a variety of archetypes who might not end up being actual users at all, or at least not early adopters. This forces us to push the boundaries of the imagined experience that rapidly forms in our minds. After all, the intended service or product and what we end up with might be something very different - we are still in the ideation phase. This also carries over into prototyping, but I hope to discuss that in another posting or slide deck.

I agree with Barbara that many of us will fall into the trap of thinking of ‘I’ as literally meaning ‘me,’ but that isn’t what we’re talking about here. Firstly, I always open my workshops with some precautions about the pitfalls of assuming what users want based solely on our own biases. This is still a common problem in so many organisations, which is one of the reasons that I started to focus on ‘ideation methods’ in the first place. Second, the methodology that I have developed is specifically about ideation, not actual product design. The use of role-playing and other similar techniques in the brainstorming processes are supposed to guard against reductive thinking and making the wrong assumptions.

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