I just finished watching the great documentary on industrial design Objectified, which has interviews with many of the best designers in the history of the domain, including a personal favorite of mine, Apple’s Jonathan Ive.
One moment early in the film struck a cord. The great designer Dam Formosa from Smart Design said that we need to understand the extremes – when designing hedge-clippers, if we understand that many of the people who use such a product are arthritic, and that many others are young and muscular, then supporting both will affectively support the needs of everyone else.
Could we apply such thinking to user experience design? I think so, and I think we already do it when it comes to creating personas.
In order to better understand our users we create representative personas, based on extensive user interviews, that my team can use to as design “targets.” These personas allow me to emphasize with the consumers of my designs so that I can craft solutions that work for them, and not for me (I also try and avoid using the same type of software that I design, to reduce the potential for bias).
The thing that I have found when it comes to personas, though, is something I call the “soft middle” – personas that are accurate but are so similar to the personas in the same range that they are almost indistinct. Whenever me or my team creates such personas we often label these personas as “secondary” personas, as opposed to the “primary” personas… The ones that represent the extremes.
So, what is the most important things to put into personas? A clear and (preferably) visual representation of the key characteristics and those “extremes”. We recently did a mobile research study, to understand how people use their mobile devices – and a key indicator we focused on was the engagement and involvement people had with the mobile technology.
How they thought of the devices, and the usage patterns and mental models we defined, allowed us to better understand what users need to understand to adopt mobile services my company was offering. We learned the extremes, and built personas from them. We could have created nine personas, but found that six primary and one secondary persona represented the data we found in our user research without having a “soft middle.”
In summary – define the most important characteristics, target the extremes, and do so by research real users. If you do your due diligence you’ll end up creating solutions that service the needs you find out. Like the man said, solve the problems at both sides of the scale and chances are you’ll solve the problems of everyone in the middle as well.