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PERSONAS IN TECHNOLOGY PRODUCT DESIGNPeople react emotionally to technology. An enthusiastic reaction results in blockbuster success like the iPod; the knack that Steve Jobs has for drawing people to Apple's products explains his success. Unfortunately, reactions of frustration and irritation do not have correspondingly negative commercial consequences, at least not while there are so few choices that aren't frustrating and irritating. Specifically, the reaction we have to technology is guided by the reaction we would have to another person. Reeves and Nass demonstrated this in The Media Equation. They showed that even people who know how computers work are unable to keep themselves from assigning human traits to computer programs. This is not surprising. We spend our lives learning how to get along not with technology, but with other people. It is a complex, endlessly fascinating activity that our brains and senses are quite well adapted to. Because of this experience, we can, from just a first impression, and with no effort, fill in all sorts of details and assumptions about someone we just met. Sometimes, this doesn't serve us well and we act on stereotypes and unfair assumptions, but this ability is useful and essential to getting along with strangers and intimates alike. A well-developed instinctGiven what we know, it would be a mistake to ignore this irrepressible instinct in product design. This applies to our customers' instincts, and our developers' instincts. Our customers are going to give our products human traits, so we would prefer that they think of them as helpful, competent, and responsive instead of rude, bureaucratic, and unreliable. User interface designers deal a lot with making products helpful instead of rude, but we also have to pay attention to making products that are responsive instead of unreliable. A friendly receptionist is nice, but a friendly receptionist who never shows up to work is still going to get fired. Performance, correctness, and reliability are user interface issues. As Don Norman points out in Emotional Design, beauty is, too. We demand as much from technology as we do from a prospective mate! Alan Cooper's book The Inmates are Running the Asylum jokingly suggests that engineers belong to another species, but developers are people, too. Even developers are better at instantly grasping the complexities of another human being than abstract product requirements. Cooper's answer to this is to embody the requirements in fictitious characters he calls personas. Instead of forcing the development team to reason about lengthy lists of features, requirements, and abstract categories of users, development teams are more productive when they talk about personas. When an unanticipated question arises during design or development, a developer taps into this instinct we have in understanding people to imagine what would be best for the personas. This lets the team arrive at a consensus faster than if they were arguing about feature lists without any grounding in humanity. The term persona has also been used to refer to the personality of the product itself, especially in the field of over-the-phone speech recognition applications, as popularized by Cohen, Giangola, and Balogh in Voice User Interface Design. Because speech is so human and habitual, speech application designers have had to be especially conscious of the instantaneous and emotional reactions of callers to keep their voices calm. So developers have two types of personas to consider: archetypes of users, and the impression the application creates. Since people will presume a personality for our products anyway, designers of all kinds of technology products should design pleasant personalities intentionally. An application's personalitySo if we know that our customers are looking for even the smallest clues to see what kind of "person" our product is, that means that every detail and behavior is an opportunity to create an impression one way or another. What would you think about a co-worker who...
I don't think it's just my critical nature, but I can think of more negative things that would lower my initial impressions of someone than positive things they can do right away to make me think highly of them. Even some of the positive things would be more noticed by their absence, since they are considered common courtesy. We spend a lot of our childhood internalizing the rules for making good impressions. To make sure that the details of this personality are consistent, application designers sometimes make elaborate character sketches of their personas, specifying the car they drive, the food they eat, the cigarettes they smoke, their hobbies, and so forth. This is fun, and it makes sense that you will need more detail than what goes into the application. It is impossible not to assign a well-developed persona a name, and this is a useful way to talk about the persona during development. But for reasons I can't fathom, sometimes these names make it into the user interface. For a while, I would call Sprint, and the computer would introduce itself as "Claire," and explain its job to me. Now I think I am more egalitarian than most other Americans, and I recognize that call center operators, waiters, and clerks are people with feelings. But I really don't care what their names are, nor do I think it's appropriate for them to share with me what kind of car they drive, what food they eat, or their smoking habits. I do not like being obligated with having to remember my waiter's name. I do not want them to make me think that they care if I like them. So it is also important to consider the product's social role. Usually, that is a servile role, and fresh and spunky is probably not deferential enough. Another phone company aimed at teenagers decided that their phone presence would be a hip, upbeat, teenage girl. I would think that even hip, upbeat, teenage girls would prefer to entrust their credit card numbers to and receive cell phone activation instructions from someone who sounds a bit more sober and responsible. So while it is true that your application will be ascribed personality traits, that does not mean that you necessarily want them to be memorable personality traits. I cannot think of a circumstance where it would be a compliment to say that a waiter had a unique personality. In that sense, consistency may be more important than creativity. The easiest way to achieve consistency is to have a single author for everything the customer sees or hears. A customer profileA persona for a customer for your product also benefits from detail. Cooper even finds stock photo images so the development team can picture what the customers look like. More important than the personalities and photos of your fake customers is their goals. Sometimes, development teams use scenarios or use-cases to state goals clearly. While this is useful, it is sometimes too literal or low-level. With personas, we can use our instincts to fill in details to guide us. Together, goals and personas are powerful. It is one thing to say that a disembodied user has to be able to search patient records by family relationships. Or that the application will be used by medical receptionists. But when you know that a medical receptionist next to a constantly ringing phone has to find out which parent's insurance covers a little girl with a runny nose who has six other people behind her in line, suddenly, modelessness and responsiveness are evident needs so that interruptions are not made worse by the program. Toward technology for peopleTechnology often seems like it was developed without thinking about people because it was. It seems more serious and efficient to focus on the technical challenges and hard data. That's what business is, the engineering side, especially. Worrying about fictitious people seems like it's not very intellectual, at least in a left-brain sense. Yet speculating about people engages some of the most well-developed and little-understood mechanisms of our brains. And besides, we can't help it. Recommended reading
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