Adaptive Path Blog

Two of the speakers at this year’s UX Week have new books out: Dan Brown’s Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning and Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (both from New Riders). The two Dans recently had a conversation about their books.

Dan S: So Dan, I hear you’ve written a book. What’s it about?

Dan B: It’s funny you mention it, Dan. I have written a book. It’s about documentation for designers, covering ten different types of deliverables. Each deliverable (from personas to wireframes) has a dedicated chapter, and focuses on how to create the deliverable and how to use it in the context of a project. The book avoids specific methodologies or tools and emphasizes the contents of each type of deliverable, and how it serves as a communication tool between members of the team.

I understand your book is hitting the shelves this summer, too. What’s yours about?

Dan S: Well, Dan, mine’s an overview of interaction design, covering everything from its history to its future. I go into stuff like the different approaches to interaction design, user research, the characteristics of good interaction design, interface design, as well as some advanced topics like what’s being called “service design” and designing for adaptation and hackability. And, of course, design tools like wireframes and personas.

Perhaps since both our books cover those, we should talk about those a little. I’ve always felt most people do personas wrong and that’s why a lot of people dislike them. Dan, what’s your take on them?

Dan B: I agree with you, Dan. Many of my clients have a “so what?” attitude toward personas because as documents, personas can require a lot of preparation but have very short shelf-lives. Unless the design team has expertise in leveraging persona information throughout the design process, it’s easy for the document to gather dust soon after its creation.

Since my book focuses on the presentation of information, I don’t spend any time on how to do user research. Instead, Communicating Design provides strategies for preparing documents with whatever information you have on hand using a layered approach. The contents of every deliverable are described in a series of three layers—the first layer having the most essential elements, the second layer having useful details, and the third layer having contextual information. It’s important to understand that for the purpose of this book, layers are meant only as conceptual groupings, not as a visualization technique. In the case of personas, the first layer of information contains elements like the name of the persona and a basic account of the persona’s goals and needs. For the second layer, I recommend direct user quotes and behaviors—information that can make the persona seem more real. If so inclined, designers can also include optional contextual information like a personal background or technical expertise. I consider these to be third-layer elements.

My personal biases definitely show through here. For essential information, I believe personas need to be grounded in user needs and motivations. Demographics and personal background information can be entertaining, but ultimately of little use—even distracting—to the design process. From a documentation perspective, “doing personas wrong” means capturing information that ultimately has little bearing on the design process. The upshot is that a handful of bulleted lists may be all you need for a set of personas.

By conceiving deliverables as a series of layers, designers can focus on the important information first, communicating the essentials and adding further detail as necessary.

Staying on the topic of personas, Dan, how do you recommend designers incorporate users into interaction design projects?

Dan S: Before I answer that, Dan, I want to poke at your layered approach to documentation. Is each layer meant for a different audience, or is each layer about getting deeper meaning out of each document? Are the layers created at the same time, or added on to?

As far as personas go, aside from helping the designer empathize with users, I think they are most useful in three ways: prioritizing features, creating task “pathways,” and for evaluating design solutions. The features of your product need to address the needs of your most important persona, so personas should help determine where design and development effort should go. Next, the behaviors that should demarcate each persona should give an indication of how each persona could or would use the product, so you can design towards those behaviors. Creating storyboards and written scenarios using the personas often help with this. And then, once you have a design, you can ask, “Would Elaine use this? Could Roy?” instead of just the generic “the users.”

Dan B: In short, Dan, the layers categorize the different elements of a document by how important they are to the document. Elements on the first layer are essential—without nodes and connectors, for example, you can’t have a site map. You could include groupings of screens and tie-ins to personas on your site map, but these aren’t essential elements to site maps, and depend more on circumstance and specific project need. So though there isn’t a direct connection between the layers and the audiences, you may decide to leave information out of a document because it doesn’t suit your audience. Communicating Design helps designers distinguish between essential and non-essential elements.

As for creating the document, the designer should start with the basic information (first layer elements) and add further elements as needed by the situation and what information they have on-hand. To get back to personas, I describe a photograph as a third-layer element—nice-to-have, but not essential. This means that designers shouldn’t worry about searching Google Images unless they strongly believe that a generic photo of an abstract user will help the document in some way. Frankly, they need to be nailing down goals and behaviors first.

I like the emphasis on behaviors and prioritization, Dan. Your book describes four different approaches to design—user-centered, activity-centered, systems, and genius. In what way do user research and personas play a role in each of these approaches?

Dan S: Dan, user research is usually involved to varying degrees in all of these approaches, except for what I call “genius design.” Genius design is when the designer presumes to know enough about the users and the subject area to simply proceed with designing with little or no validation from research. This happens either because the designer simply doesn’t have the time or resources to conduct research, or simply is uninterested in it.

In the other approaches, we see designers using user research to undercover insights about the users, such as behaviors, environments, tasks and goals. They then take the research data and make models out of it: “things to think with” as the models have been called. One type of model is, of course, personas, because they should be based on research, not on what the designer (or marketing department) thinks the users are or should be. These types of models help designers (and, very importantly, others!) understand what they’ve just witnessed in the research. They are what I (and others of course) call “conceptual models.”

Is this what you call “Concept Models” in your book, Dan, or is that something different?

Dan B: In Communicating Design, Dan, a Concept Model is a variation of the concept mapping technique developed by Joseph Novak for use in education. In concept maps, nouns are connected by verbs, like Owner –> walks –> Dog.

Web designers use more elaborate concept models to illustrate the relationships between the important aspects of a project, like users, stakeholders, processes, documents, systems, or anything else. When I start a new project, I’ll typically use a concept model as an internal document to help me understand all the nuances and different players. As you say, these models may be the result of research, but concept models don’t necessarily focus on users exclusively.

Bryce Glass developed a concept model to describe Flickr. Bryce was kind enough to let me use the illustration in my book. (I’ll never get tired of pointing people to that thing.)

Concept Models illustrate a good general principle throughout the book: documents are flexible, and may be used in a variety of situations. I hope I’ve laid out the book to help people take advantage of this flexibility, and see ways they can use documents that they haven’t used before.

Part Two

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 9:39 am and is filed under Conversations, Friends of Adaptive Path, Interaction Design, Plugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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