Design Process | Tool 01" personae"

LET'S START THE DESIGN THINKING PROCESS

Who is "the User"?

Brouce MauIncomplete manifesto for growth

Bill Moggridgeco-founder of IDEO and director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum was most interested in what people want, who they are, and how they interact with other people, things, and places. Author of Designing Media (2010), and Designing Interactions (2006), which explores how interaction design transforms daily life. Designing Interactions, was named one of the 10 Best Innovation and Design Books of 2006 by BusinessWeek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWkk9sr_GOs

"Rigorous explicit thinking, of the kind encouraged in institutions of higher learning, limits people to conscious thinking and hence to using just a tiny proportion of the potential in their minds. The design thinking process allows us to follow our intuition, valuing the sensibilities and insights that are buried in our subconscious."

“I also attempted to describe a process which is basically an iteration kind of process, circular, at the beginning you work your way around it but I wanted to be sure that it’s clear that it’s not a slavish thing, you don’t necessarily have to follow the entire cirle, and I took an example, see the green line in the middle, of an actual project and said “ok where did we do things in that real project?” and found that it puns around it looks a bit more like a pin ball machine than a wheel ... ”February 2, 2007 lecture by Bill Moggridge for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547) h t t p : / / w w w. y o u t u b e . c o m / u s e r / S t a n f o r d U n i v e r s i t y /videos?query=moggridge

An example of a design-thinking process, could see seven steps: - define - research - ideate - prototype - choose - implement - learn.The design-thinking process as developed by Hasso Plattner Institute of Design11 (img above) instead focuses more on the research moment, that coincide with the “learn” step, split into “understand” and “observe”stressing the importance of users centrality.Like the design process described by B. Moggridge the design-thinking Hasso Plattner Institute of Design process is iterative and not linear. The steps of the process, within a design-thinking approach, indeed are performed in a non linear way “this kind of process is actually not even strictly circular. They are indeed iterative process, where the design steps can be often taken simultaneously and are followed and repeated in a non sequential order.”

All of the design disciplines share a process something like this. It varies somewhat between architecture or industrial design at one end and jewelry or ceramic design at the other, but the main iterative structure is always there. Both logical thinking and intuitive inspirations are essential for successful results in the process, but that is not what we mean when we apply the recently popular "Design Thinking" label.

developer designer

COLLABORATION

creatinguser profiles

interrogativethinking

what if approach

mind mapping

visual thinkingscenarios

implement

learn

define

whowhatwherewhenwhyhow

what if ... ?6 w’s

heuristics

how to ... ?heuristics

heuristicschoose

prototype& test

ideate

research

understandobserve

Personas are a tool for sharing our understanding of our expected users, as a starting point for design.

Whether we are designing a jet plane or a learning activity, we are ultimately designing it for people – pilots and passengers in the first case, teachers and learners in the second. In order to fit the needs and constraints of these people, we need to have a model of the actors playing a role in our innovation. One popular way of representing such models, adapted from software development, is called “personas”.

Nielsen (2013) notes:

The persona method has developed from being a method for IT system development to being used in many other contexts, including development of products, marketing, planning of communication, and service design. [..] Common understanding is that the persona is a description of a fictitious person, but whether this description is based on assumptions or data is not clear, and opinions also differ on what the persona description should cover.

PERSONAS

In our design process, we never refer to "the user." Instead, we refer to a very specific individual: a persona.

Why use personas? Alan Cooper explains:Whenever I hear the phrase "the user," it sounds to me like "the elastic user." The elastic user must bend and stretch and adapt to the needs of the moment. However, our goal is to design software that will bend and stretch and adapt to the user's needs. […]Designing for the elastic user gives the developer license to code as he pleases while paying lip service to "the user." Real users are not elastic.[…]

Life Cycle Design Personae

Nielsen (2013) describes the role personas in the design process:

In the design process, we begin to imagine how the product is to work and look before any sketch is made or any features described. If the design team members have a number of persona descriptions in front of them while designing, the personas will help them maintain the perspective of the users. The moment the designers begin to imagine how a possible product is to be used by a persona, ideas will emerge. Thus, I maintain that the actual purpose of the method is not the persona descriptions, but the ability to imagine the product. In the following, I designate these product ideas as scenarios. It is in scenarios that you can imagine how the product is going to work and be used, in what context it will be used, and the specific construction of the product. And it is during the work with developing scenarios that the product ideas emerge and are described. The persona descriptions are thus a means to develop specific and precise descriptions of products.

Jakob Nielsen (born 1957) is a web usability consultant.He holds a Ph.D. in human–computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen.Together with Donald Norman, Bruce Tognazzini e Jef Raskin is considered a Usability Guru.

Opere:Web usability (2000)Usability Engineering Homepage usability. Web Usability 2.0. L'usabilità che conta (2006)

http://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/

Cooper provides some guidelines for authoring personas:

Be Specific: The more specific we make our personas, the more effective they are as design tools. That's because personas lose elasticity as they become specific. For example, we […] don't just let Emilee drive to work. We give her a dark-blue 1991 Toyota Camry, with a gray plastic kid's seat strapped into the back and an ugly scrape on the rear bumper. This distinctive specificity is very powerful as a design and communications tool. Consequently, all of our personas are articulated with singular detail and precision. As we isolate Emilee with specific, idiosyncratic detail, a remarkable thing happens: She becomes a real person in the minds of the designers and programmers. […]

Giving the persona a name is one of the most important parts of successfully defining one. A persona without a name is simply not useful. Without a name, a persona will never be a concrete individual in anyone's mind. […]

To make each persona more real to everyone involved in the product creation, I like to put faces to the names and give each persona an image. […]

Precision, Not Accuracy As a design tool, it is more important that a persona be precise than accurate. That is, it is more important to define the persona in great and specific detail than that the persona be the precisely correct one. This truth is surprising because it is the antithesis of the goal of interaction design, in which accuracy is always more important than precision. […]

Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic,"[1] Cooper is also known for his books on About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper

Cooper concludes:

Personas are the single most powerful design tool that we use. They are the foundation for all subsequent Goal-Directed design. Personas allow us to see the scope and nature of the design problem. They make it clear exactly what the user's goals are, so we can see what the product must do – and can get away with not doing.

Example of hand drawing story telling persona

https://vimeo.com/68659872

DISCOVER MORE

http://www.designkit.org/methods

http://uxmag.com/articles/how-to-use-persona-empathy-mapping?utm_content=bufferc1fb1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer