Design for the Persona, or the Self?
User-centered design has long championed the use of personas as a concrete way to conceptualize the amorphous concept of the ‘user’. Personas force all the designers to focus on particular well-formed individuals rather than some notion of The User that they silently disagree on [1].
This year at CHI, John Zimmerman at CMU presented a paper on Design for the Self, which is a process to create designs that help users become the person they want to be [2]. Create a design that allows the user to project themselves as the perfect parent when they use the system, and they will love it.
John didn’t couch his paper in quite this way, but I see an interesting productive tension between the two approaches. Do you design for a persona, which is an idealized picture of how the user is now, or do you design for the self, which is the user’s idealized vision of who they want to be? Do you design for the overworked businessman, or design for the businessman who’s totally in control of his life?
Is this just a matter of usability vs. user experience? Or something deeper?
[1] Cooper, Alan. The Inmates are Running the Asylum. 1999.
[2] Zimmerman, John. Designing for the Self: Making Products that Help People Become the Person they Desire to Be. CHI 2009.
Sometimes it is better to look at the real world and absorb them into theory. For example, Apple never cared about how users want the products to be – still cut / copy / paste is missing in iPhone. It was mentioned somewhere that USERS are not to be trusted with what they want, because they rarely do know. Of course it proved to be success, at least in creating a trend. But in market? Perhaps thats what Apple intend to!
In my opinion the difference between Personas and Self becomes significant depending on the application. For a selected application and occasional use, we might want to live in the dream world – Self – or at least most of the web applications, virtual realities, and other entertainment businesses like tv series, movies and fictions are targeting it. But when it comes to a periodic event, we wouldn’t want to go for a milkshake instead of an early morning coffee.
interseting read.. but design has to be for the person, sometimes I know this is hard to do.