I have been reading about the process of interaction design, and I have come to recognize many of the seemingly innocuous decisions that I made during past efforts that resulted in simply awful design. The scary part is that it is very hard to tell the difference between an harmless design decision and a very harmful one until you have invested a lot of effort in implementing it. Furthermore, good design thrives on a detailed understanding of your users’ desires and expectations.
In this last statement lies a cornerstone of Cooper’s methodology for creating software that really works. I believe that the innate desire of developers and managers alike is to believe they know the user. Therein exists a dangerous pitfall according Cooper. What I am thinking when I say “user” and what you are thinking are most certainly different. Instead, he recommends that people take the time to make up detailed personas that very specifically describe the users.
Doris is a stay-at-home mother with 2 children, ages 2 and 5. She is passionate about mountain biking, and therefore, covets her time to ensure that she can get to the Mountain Biking Club meet-up each week. She is a big fan of Martha Stewart’s style magazine and buys much of her home decor based on the suggestions she finds there.
It is pretty easy to imagine how this kind of description would help to inform design decisions in the software you are making. And when the nearly inevitable feature negotiations start, anyone can say “Doris wouldn’t use this because…” or “This wouldn’t make sense to Doris. She would expect…”. Conceptually simple, it helps to eliminate the ambiguity of the “user”.
The model goes further to suggest that often developers and their managers forget that the user is a person, with feelings. One of the primary goals of every user of technology (who doesn’t think like a computer already) is to not look stupid. Feelings? In software? It makes a lot of sense. Who hasn’t been frustrated when the ATM machine spits your card out unexpectedly admonishing you with a blinking “Transaction Terminated”? If you are like me, you get annoyed every time you hit the print button and the computer seems to forget that you print with the exact same settings 99.995% of the time, and proceeds to present you with a bunch of options that are completely meaningless to you. I am reasonably sure I know how to use a computer, and the process of printing a document makes me question myself. It certainly feels wrong.
Ignoring the sensibilities and emotions may not be a recipe for disaster, but it is almost certainly setting you up for obscurity in the not to distant future. There are numerous counter examples. Try setting up a MySpace account. If you don’t feel at least mildly stupid by the end of that, you are either and actual dolt or so smart that you should apply for a job as a developer where I work. And yet, they have millions of avid users. The space that their application occupies in peoples’ lives is so important, that they are willing to put up with the horror that is myspace page customization. What is interesting to me is that the writing is on the wall for myspace already. Competitor Facebook took the approach of limiting customizations but making sign-up and account management much easier, and people are noticing. It remains to be seen if this will affect the long term viability of the myspace application, but I have a very strong suspicion that it will. I measure this by the fact that I have never met a single fan of myspace (the web application). They like being in touch with their friends, they like being able to post all sorts of embarrassing personal information, but they don’t ever mention actually liking the process by which they do it. In fact, several complain about it.
Ultimately, my point is that design matters. For relatively recent proof, see the iPod that every other person on the street is carrying. It is hard to get it right, and oh so easy to get it wrong. Anecdotally, I can’t think of one product that I love that I would also consider poorly designed. The way most people react to this realization is that they think they need to hire artists, when they really need a social psychologist. When developing new technology we need to think first of Doris. Artists can come along later and make our targeted functional designs pretty.
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