Update: Since the original publication I’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback concerning the definition of personas (as I anticipated). To that end, I’ve tried to incorporate all those concerns into the piece. It has changed significantly as a result.

Steve Portigal, whom I’ve met and whom I don’t think is insane, recently said in a presentation that “personas are user-centered bullshit”.

But he didn’t stop there. He then went on to write an article in this months ACM Interactions magazine extolling the evils of personas which is provoking quite a reaction among designers.

Portigal isn’t the only one to argue against personas. Jason Fried said recently that personas “lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.”

Each of these pieces has received a mountain of pushback from members of the design community, who feel that in many ways personas are the best tools for communicating design research throughout heterogeneous groups made up of designers, marketers, managers, and executives.

Peter Merholz, in describing a recent project, found personas quite valuable:

‘So on the morning of the second day we dove into a discussion of personas — those archetypal users of the product. We had three personas (Casey, Jessica, and Eric), and we talked about (and occasionally argued about) them for quite a while, until we arrived at a shared understanding of who they are, and what they would get out of the product.

This discussion proved enormously valuable — it lead to some coherence around who the product was for, and it helped focus our discussion of desired experiences, and, in turn, functional requirements. We referred to these personas for the remainder of the workshop, and they came in handy for resolving conversations that got stuck in “Well, I think…”‘

Definition, please?

But while all of this arguing is going on, nobody is really defining what personas are. This, of course, is a big part of the problem…

Continue Reading: Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself

Opinions from anybody but users rarely matter.

It’s too fun to play pundit. When MySpace was growing hugely popular, about the time that it was sold to News Corp. for 580 million dollars, everyone had an opinion about it.

It’s ugly. It’s horribly designed. They got lucky. It’s just perfect timing. The page views are way out of whack. It’s a fluke. Whatever the reason, it was en vogue to trash the site. Very few people who didn’t use the site (other than investors) gave much credit to the amazing growth and success they were enjoying.

The people sharing their opinions …designers, technologists, journalists, weren’t the people who mattered. They (we) didn’t matter because they (we) weren’t using the site.

Then I had a conversation with an actual MySpacer, and I never thought about MySpace the same…

Continue Reading: The hidden lives of MySpacers

How “information architecture” is defined much too broadly, frames design in the wrong way, and suffers from infoprefixation.

One of the more insightful social design books of the last decade is John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information (ch. 1), in which the authors suggest that we suffer from “tunnel vision” caused by an over-focus on technology. Certainly, the technological explosion of the Web has brought about huge changes, as Brown and Duguid should know: Brown works at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Duguid works at UC Berkeley, two of the most distinguished technology havens on Earth.

Infoprefixation

One emergent problem Brown and Duguid describe is called “infoprefixation”, or being over-fixated on information instead of focusing on the people who use it to enrich their lives. Here’s how they explain it:

“…you don’t need to look far these days to find much that is familiar in the world redefined as information. Books are portrayed as information containers, libraries as information warehouses, universities as information providers, and learning as information absorption. Organizations are depicted as information coordinators, meetings as information consolidators, talk as information exchange, markets as information-driven stimulus and response”

This tendency to reframe things in terms of information echoes my frustrations with “information architecture”…

Continue Reading: More Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

Last week I wrote about How to prevent valueless design in social web sites. My main point was that most of the value people get from the sites comes over time from the interactions with other people, not from the sublimity of the visual design.

In that post, I used an analogy that pissed people off. I used the analogy that great-looking interfaces can at times be like a public speech out of touch with an audience…solidly executed but sending the wrong message…

Continue Reading: Can we talk about politics and design at the same time?

Kevin Gamble (via Dave Weinberger):

“Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working (scaling) to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? I’m being quite serious here. Can you point me to a working model?.”

Why is this an important question?

Continue Reading: Is there an Example of a Scalable Taxonomy?

Gene Smith has a nice cheat sheet of this important article on tagging systems.
He quotes the article (which I had read quite some time back, but now with renewed interest)
“The motivations to tag can be categorized into two high-level practices: organizational and social. The first arises from the use of tagging as an [...]

Continue Reading: Why do People Tag?

Update: Changed some wording…some folks thought I was arguing with Zeldman. Actually, I was agreeing with him, and finding that his post echoed what I’ve found to be true.
Jeffrey Zeldman on how he softened up to usability:
“Like many design professionals, I rejected usability when I first encountered it. That’s mainly because I first encountered [...]

Continue Reading: Zeldman on Usability

In The Most Frustrating Thing, Matt Mullenweg, who helped create the Wordpress software that runs this site, is frustrated about our geeky fascination with technology and design. So frustrated, in fact, that he claims they don’t matter…

Continue Reading: Different Context, Different Design

Paul Rand on Design:

“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.”

Note how Rand goes way beyond the common notion of design, incorporating not only the editing of content, but the embellishment of it. I think we need that sort of broad view of Web design, a field that is far too focused on the technical aspect of publishing, and hardly, if ever, focused on the verbs Rand was occupied with…

Continue Reading: Paul Rand on Design

Most books that claim to be about web design aren’t about web design at all. They’re about publishing in HTML and CSS, which by and large has little to do with the problems of the users we’re supposed to be designing for.

I was in a Barnes and Noble this weekend looking at web design books. There were lots of them! I saw old favorites like Eric Meyer’s O’Reilly books and new favorites like Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design. I have a collection of these books, and my life has been made easier by them. I’m grateful for that.

But these aren’t really design books, per se. They’re more like books about web development, a similar and related field but not quite the same. They’re books about how to publish web sites in HTML and CSS. That’s publishing, not design…

Continue Reading: 99% of Web Design Books are Not