Chapter 3: Modeling Users: Personas and Goals

When you have spent some time out in the field investigating your users’ lives, motivations the questions come up and the concept of a model solves this. Why do we model?

“Models are used in the natural and social sciences to represent complex phenomena with a useful abstraction. “We can use research to create descriptive models of users is a uniquely powerful tool for interaction design called models personas.

These personas provide us with a precise way of thinking and communicating about how groups of users behave, personas are composite archetypes based on behavior patterns uncovered during the course of our research.When personas are used we can develop an understanding of our users’ goals in specific context.

Personas can help designers:

Determine what a product should do and how it should behave.

·       Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers.

·       Buildconsensusandcommitmenttothedesign.Withacommonlanguagecomesa common understanding.

·       Measure the design’s effectiveness. Design choices can be tested on a persona in the same way that they can be shown to a real user during the formative process.

·       Contribute to other product-related effort such as marketing and sales plans.

Design pitfalls that personas help avoid.

Personas also can resolve three design issues that arise during product development:

The elastic user: When it’s time to make product decisions, this “user” becomes elastic, conveniently bending and stretching to fit the opinions and presuppositions of whoever is talking.

Self-referential design: Self-referential design occurs when designers or developers project their own goals, motivations, skills, and mental models onto a product’s design. Many “cool” product designs fall into this category.

Edgecases : situations that might happen but that usually won’t for most people. Typically, edge cases must be designed and programmed for, but they should never be the design focus. 

“There are organizations with more than one product often want to reuse the same personas. How- ever, to be effective, personas must be context-specific: They should focus on the behaviors and goals related to the specific domain of a particular product. “

User roles :

A user role or role model, as defined by Larry Constantine, is an abstraction—a defined relationship between a class of users and their problems, including needs, interests, expectations, and patterns of behavior.6

Designing for visceral response:

Designing for the visceral level means designing what the senses initially perceive before any deeper involvement with a product or artifact occurs. I learned that visceral design is actually about designing for affect which is eliciting the appropriate psychological or emotional response for a particular context  and not aesthetics alone.

The three types of user goals:

Norman presents his three-level theory of cognitive processing and discusses its potential importance to design. Experience goals are simple, universal, and personal. These goals express how someone wants to feel while using a product. End goals represent the user’s motivation for performing the tasks associated with using a specific product.  It’s important that End goals must be met for users to think that a product is worth their time and money. Lastly, we have Life goals represent the user’s personal aspirations that typically go beyond the context of the product being designed. Life goals describe a persona’s long-term desires, motivations, and self-image attributes, and that causes the persona to connect with a product.

Nonuser goals

User goals are not the only type of goals that designers need to consider. Customer goals, business goals, and technical goals are all nonuser goals.

business and organizational goals

Businesses and other organizations have their own requirements for products, services, and systems, which you also should model and consider when devising design solutions.

Technical goals

Most of the software-based products we use every day are created with technical goals in mind.

There’s is a target for designing Design which is the audience upon whom the design is focused. You should try to get as specific as you can and try to create a design solution that should serve the needs of even three or four personas which at times can be an overwhelming. We should prioritize our personas to determine which should be the main target.

The six types of personas are:

• Primary : or the main target of interface design.

• Secondary : is mostly satisfied with the primary persona’s interface

• Supplemental : User personas that are not primary or secondary are supplemental personas. The needs are represented by a combination of primary and secondary personas.

• Customer: address the needs of customers, not end users, as discussed earlier in this chapter.

• Served: These are not users of the product, but they are directly affected using the product.

• Negative: Used to communicate to stakeholders and product team members that the product is not being built to serve specific types of users.

I learned that Personas are purposely constructed from data gathered from real (and potential) users. These allows the designers to separate critical behaviors and needs that are common across a broad set of users from the personal behaviors that are particular to a given user.

Workflow models

Workflows are great at capturing information flow inside organizations.  The Workflows are usually expressed as flow charts or directed graphs that capture several phenomena:

·       Decisions that are made

·       Information that is used to support decisions.

·       A process’s goal or desired outcome

Artifact models

Represent different artifacts that users employ in their tasks and workflow.

Physical models

capture elements of the user’s environment. These models are focused on capturing the layout of physical objects that deal with the user’s workspace.

At the end of the day these personas and other models help us make sense of otherwise overwhelming and puzzling data!