If you’ve ever spent time with an interactive agency defining a digital experience (website, integrated campaign, web application, etc), you’ve most likely seen the results of several developed personae - fictitious representations that encapsulate targeted, prioritized user types. Historically, personae have been touted as a key deliverable when developing any user-centered product. At texturemedia, we certainly subscribe to this belief and have found them effective in allowing clients and project team members to “think like an end-user.”

When designing any experience, it is all too easy to design from the “inside out” - that is, allowing the business requirements and internal view of the business to drive the structure and the interface of an interactive experience. After all, it’s the easiest and fastest way to get a new site up and running. All of the subject matter expertise within a business is right before you, residing in the heads of your internal stakeholders. All you need to do is to extract that knowledge and assemble it in a digestible manner. Sounds easy enough, right? The way that internal stakeholders view their business is invariably strikingly different than the way a user (particularly a new one) would approach your business. Our view at texturemedia is that we need to marry internal business requirements with end-user needs so that both audiences are served equally. For us, our clients are simply one more end-user in the mix; personae have been a great way to bridge the gap between to disparate audiences and to stimulate discussion during the site definition phase.

Interestingly, personae have been under fire recently in the Interaction Design community, with many questioning their effectiveness. Perhaps the most bold statement lately has come from Jared Spool, noted usability and user experience expert. At the recent IA Summit 2008, Spool opened his keynote stating “User centered design has never worked.” While this post is not an attempt to dissect Spool’s message (perhaps to come in a later post), it is an attempt to point out a shift in the Interaction Design community. Professionals within the trade are asking the following: “Are personae truly useful in creating a user-centered design? If not, how might we adjust our process and methodologies to be even better?” To some extent, the issue here is less about persona effectiveness and more about questioning methodologies within our practice. The fact that we, as professionals, are willing to question our process is the reason that I am in this field. As the digital landscape changes daily, we must, as professionals, question our process and approach to any given solution; after all, it may not be the right approach to articulate all of the appropriate solutions.

At texturemedia, we struggle with this challenge daily, and the persona debate is only one such example of how it is mandatory that those in the interactive field must remain fluid and flexible in their approach. The irony here, of course, is that due to the complexity of building interactive products, rigid process and methodology can ensure quality products that are on-time and on-budget. For us, it’s all about learning how to improvise within a structured ideology that keeps us in check.

When was the last time you truly questioned your approach to designing and building interactive solutions?

Peyton Lindley, Interaction Design