Here is the first part of a discussion I had with Don Norman about his recently published articles on the use of personas and activity-based design…<\/p>\n
How does (or should) the thesis of your article, if accepted, affect a group’s use of personas as a design tool? Should we forget about them (except as a communication tool) and concentrate on activities as the driving forces behind product design? <\/em><\/p>\n Don:<\/strong> Well, we got along quite well without personas before they became popular. I do not think they are important for the intelligent, observant, designer. As I an d you) said, I think they are useful mainly in communicating the decisions to other people.<\/p>\n I think the emphasis on activities is the key.<\/p>\n Is there perhaps too much growing faith in the power of personas at the expense of in-depth understanding of activities and their associated problems? <\/em><\/p>\n Don:<\/strong> Absolutely. The persona still says nothing about how to design. <\/p>\n Is a focus on activities perhaps too mechanistic, and blind to all the nuanced subjectivities of experience that contribute to a product’s success or failure, that are better captured between the lines of a persona narrative? (sorry for the awkward sentence, but I could think of how to better phrase it) .<\/em><\/p>\n Don:<\/strong> No. <\/p>\n Any single prescription runs the risk of being accepted mechanically. But if you have only average designers, then mechanical solutions are apt to be pretty good — better than they might produce otherwise. <\/p>\n Is a persona centered design approach even a user centered design approach? Or are many of us simply seduced by ease and economy of them compared with studying actual people? <\/em><\/p>\n Don:<\/strong> If you don’t study real people, then you can’t produce sensible personas! A persona is, after all, a distillation of the knowledge gathered about numerous individuals. <\/p>\n What is a comfortable balance between understanding people and activities in terms of designing better products? Your articles hint at an answer here. <\/em><\/p>\n Don:<\/strong> In no way can you understand activities without understanding people. An activity is the set of actions ( perceptions, thoughts, decisions, and actions) made within t he context of a set of goals. One cannot separate activities from people. Activities are goal-driven, and goals exist only in the heads of people. A major support need is to handle changing goals, and interrupted goal-driven activity — and this involves people.<\/p>\n Does this help at all?<\/p>\n Thanks for writing, and for the useful set of questions.<\/p>\n Don<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Part of a discussion I had with Don Norman about his recently published articles on the use of personas and activity-based design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parCYG-5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":473,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}