I used to like 37Signals and their blog, but recently it has turned into what they’ve often decried in the past: a PR soapbox. Half the posts it seems are about their own products, how great they are, how the 37Signals team uses their own products, how the products got designed, and how 37Signals is taking it to The Man. In fact, 14 of the last 23 posts to the SVN blog fall into this realm by my count. Certainly some of it is interesting behind-the-scenes and tips/tricks stuff, but the density of it gets wearing.

Some of the recent posts have been breezy treatments on complicated topics like “How has open-source helped or hindered?” (answer: it’s all good!) and “Can I build a product business if I’m just a designer?” (answer: here’s a few anecdotes from my personal experience that are unique and have nothing to do with you. You go girl!)

The post that got my ire up just now was one about personas. Essentially Jason says, “Personas are crap. Don’t bother with them. We don’t use them, neither should you. We design for ourselves and our needs, because lots of other people have our needs, and that’s how you should design too.”

Here’s how Jason starts the post:

We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.

Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems. We recognize our problems aren’t unique. In fact, our problems are probably a lot like your problems. So we bundle up the solutions to our problems in the form of web-based software and offer them for sale.

Ah, if only life were that easy all the time. What if you have to design a dental chair, and you’ve never done dentistry? You could look at it from the standpoint of the patient, since you’ve been in that position, but you don’t really know what goes on in the mind of a dentist or the dental assistant, who are the two other users of the chair (and quite different in what they want and need from dental equipment, by the way).

Now I’m not the world’s biggest fan of personas, but this often comes down to execution rather than the tool itself. Personas are often done poorly or used in ways they shouldn’t be. They are not always the most effective means of conveying user needs and perceptions. But they have their place and if done well can be useful. And the basic goal of a persona is valuable: help the design team think about the various people they are designing for who are not like the designers themselves. They are less useful and defensible when made up entirely rather than synthesized out of in-person user research, and Jason seems to assume that all personas are made up.

Jason says:

We recognize not everyone shares our problems, our point of view, or our opinions, but that verdict’s the same if you use personas. Making decisions based on real opinions trumps making decisions based on imaginary opinions.

Exactly. Personas can (and should if possible) be based on real opinions too, they don’t have to be fabricated. With any type of deep qualitative user research, whether conducted on yourself or others, requires a level of abstraction and extrapolation in order to be effective (which is why qual and quant must be compelentary). Personas are no different, they just make the extrapolation more explicit.

The whole point of personas is to avoid the problem of designers (or engineers, or marketers, or whomever) thinking that their problems are the same as their customers’ problems, and that their customers think the way they do. This is a proven path to failure for many products. Blithely assuming that everyone else designs products for people like themselves, a la 37Signals or Jake Burton, smacks of arrogance and/or narrow-mindedness.

I’m excited to say that we have published a new issue of the frog Design Mind, frog’s bi-monthly newsletter. This is a special issue dedicated to the topic of green design, and I had the pleasure and privilege of coordinating it. I think we’ve got some pretty interesting articles that look at the challenge of more eco-friendly design from wide range of perspectives. This is part of a broader effort within frog of becoming a more green-focused company, both working with clients and with our own operations, of which more will be rolled out in the coming months. This is just a first public step.

There are ten articles, some essays, others photo explorations which are a mix of design, technology, brand, marketing, and economics approaches to green design.

My particular article, The Tragedy of the Commons argues that we need to add an “E-Factor” to the typical triad of Business, People and Technology that is used to evaluate the appropriateness of new products and innovations. Sometimes this means taking the blasphemous step of ignoring what we find in customer-centered research.

We’ll have a few podcasts coming in the next week or so, too. 

Read it here. 

Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path has written a nice article over at Business Week about the new Jitterbug phone and service created for older people who may have difficulties with conventional mobile phones.

For mobile-industry veteran Arlene Harris, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Harris is the mastermind behind Jitterbug, a company launched last October that combines a unique mobile phone (designed by Jitterbug and manufactured by Samsung) with a suite of services designed to meet the needs of older users. Because Jitterbug controlled both the product and service design, it’s able to deliver a seamless, innovative cross-channel experience, a rarity in the mobile-phone industry.

It’s a great example of “the system is the product”:

Harris recognized that a product alone couldn’t meet the needs of her audience—it had to be combined with services to create an overall system. As a result, the product was designed in tandem with services that would be delivered to subscribers….

This system approach took Jitterbug’s partners at Samsung by surprise. “They knew that we would have to be a service provider, but they had no idea the extent to which we wanted to integrate [the product with the service],” Harris says. “For them it was a handset, for us it was a system. The handset was just one element.”

Exactly.

I love how they have dial tones, too.

Vodafone has done very well with its Simply phone, though from what I can tell Jitterbug is going quite a bit further with the system integration. And Simply started out as a no-frills phone aimed at budget-conscious customers but turned out to be attractive to older users once it got on the market, whereas Jitterbug is specifically geared for that demographic. This area of designing for aging baby boomers is going to be huge, and right now it’s a market littered with crap that they won’t want to buy. Hello, opportunity.

I had an interesting conversation with a colleage at work the other day about the impacts of user research and putting innovative products, software and services in the hands and lives of users. Essentially the discussion revolved around the notion of whether through our work we reveal unmet behaviors, use models and attitudes, or whether we actually change users in some way. His take on it was that we reveal, my take on it is that we create change.

To my knowledge, no research has been done into this question, and it’s one that at an almost subconscious level has been bugging me for quite a while. When this conversation occurred it brought to light (for me) some issues that had been bubbling beneath the service about the practice and value of user research. I’d be interested to hear other people’s responses.

The Reveal argument goes basically that when we put a novel product in front of someone it may satisfy a need (behavioral, attitudinal, perceptual, emotional etc.) that had heretofore been unaddressed and perhaps even unrecognized (latent need). By exposing and tapping into that unmet need, or by landing on it by happenstance, we enable those needs to be met. By finding and addressing these unmet needs we create products that we be valued and therefore profitable.

The Change argument is that new innovative products do indeed change the way people see the world and how they behave, and introduce needs and ideas that had not been previously present at any level in that person’s mind. The Change model is more about creating opportunities for users, than it is about addressing needs that are always/already there (to use Jacques Derrida’s phrase). The change comes from the user recognizing that the product enables them to do things they have never been able to do before, and then adapting to that change.

The conundrum of the Reveal argument for me is that it implies an almost infinite quantity and variety of needs for any given person, that they are almost infinitely malleable. All we have to do is present an individual with something meeting one of those huge number of needs, a switch will go off, and they will start wanting whatever it is we have created.

On the one hand this is quite a freeing way of seeing people, as it assumes a huge capacity of change and adaption, which is a very useful thing. On the other hand, it treats people as “empty vessels” into which anything can be poured. It infantalizes people - they become child-like blank slates with lots of needs but lacking the ability to articulately express them.

This is a common sub-text of critiques of consumerism: people are vulnerable and need to be protected from the excesses of duplicity of capitalism. I’m no unquestioning fan of capitalism by any stretch, but I’m also not one to think that adults can’t critically see the world around them and not believe everything that advertising and the media throws at them. I put myself more in the camp of Michel de Certeu, for those familiar with him.

Beyond that, it makes people equivalences of one another (each containing largely the same huge set of needs) — a homogonization that ignores culture and upbringing, that I find distasteful.

And so to the Change argument — do we actually change people? I believe we do. I believe that new products can change how we interact with others, how we conduct our leisure and work, how we deal with information and entertainment, and thus change the way we behave and see the world. People and books cause changes like this (sometimes in spite of selfish “needs”), so why not products too? The change must still be relevant, but it need not be constrained by existing (even latent) needs.

There’s that saying, possibly apocryphal, that if Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said “A faster horse.” Cars are addressing the same fundamental need of travelling from A to B that horses do, yet they have also created massive change in other ways that “faster horses” never would. Cars have created needs, behaviors and attitudes that would not have existed if cars had not been invented. Needs are created, not just revealed, and needs become extinct.

This is actually very reminiscent of the creationism vs. evolution question. Strict creationism holds that all species alive today are all that have ever existed and will ever exist, because God is infallible and would not create imperfect species that could have died out. Evolution says that species adapt to change around them, in turn causing more change, and that the environment shapes the species at least as much as the species shapes the environment (well, with the exception of humanity). We know from the fossil record that vast numbers of species have in fact gone extinct because they could not adapt to the new needs that were being “revealed”.

Really this isn’t an either/or proposition. Products do indeed reveal needs, and they do also create genuine change. But let’s not get trapped in a reductionist “creationist” mode that over simplifies people’s complexities and capacity for adaptation.