Selling Personas and Scenarios to Students
Thursday, September 27th, 2007
Some days are diamonds and others are mediocre. I’m not sure how effective my dollar value for the students was today, particularly this afternoon, but it could be as much about their return from holidays as the content I delivered. Usability just never sounds as sexy as some of the other more tutorial driven stuff like building a site in code or creating drop down menus, multimedia interaction or transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images. Also, I’m not a good information chunker and do expect students to bear with me through the long haul.
In the big picture usability (and accessibility) are much more important to get a handle on than the low level implementation stuff. Its one thing to know how to make a website and another entirely to know how to make one well.
More specifically I found it very difficult to sell the practical benefit of using personas and scenarios to identify user groups and possible interaction for the new project. I agree on the surface they do sound like a bit of a waste of time but in practice there are great benefits to be made from investing in these techniques - if only you can get people to use them.
Another important part of design which gets highly underrated is research. Check out the opposition - what are contemporary sites in that field doing well or bad? What do you like or don’t like about their features? What statistics are out there? The project is a large information space and if there is relevant data does any identify significant user groups which might be important to consider?
The next key feature here is documentation - write your ideas and anything you find down and create artefacts you can keep in your morgue file for other projects and later reference. If you have any sort of client worth keeping you should be providing some form of documentation in that direction as well. This is the stuff they put on file and hand over to the next designer / developer if they choose to go in another direction.
The key components of user centered design have to involve these practices - who is the user and what do they want to do? Its fine to believe you intuitively know the users, or the world is a generic user group - but be careful with that philosophy. Go too broad and you really don’t know anything.
Now I’m sitting here thinking… these students need users. How do I get them some users? How do I get them to make some effort in the direction of scenarios and personas? And how do we move into implementing some user centred design techniques.
What differentiates a good web developer from a bad one? Mainly its being aware there is more to this business than simple Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Read about psychology, marketing, business, design, information management, programming, culture, demographic information, and reports on just about anything you can get your hands on. The more you understand about people and diversity the better you will understand there IS difference and diversity.
Some days it feels so frustrating to have that knowledge and feel nobody has taken it on board. Many of the ideas are intuitively simple and obvious - yet amazingly overlooked. I might have to actually get them to write some of these documents next week against their will - oh my God - and we can pool them together under the title ‘Design Team’. Now there’s a positive idea.
