connecting*the*dots

If you’re an interaction designer, think about the process of generating design personae while listening to Gladwell.

Designers are held to such a double-standard, especially designers of the interactive media.

The stereotype of a designer is that he or she is, more likely than not, self-referential with their work. Business cringes when faced with the prospect of bringing in a new designer to a product team, as visions of a self-glorified, controlling, pompous designer wandering the halls, makes business and technology folks toss and turn in bed at night. I mean, come on, all designers are "shiny-shiny" types, looking for that Golden Pencil or Webby Award, right?

Business folks talk about wanting designers who have a rationale before, say, changing the paradigm of interface behavioral patterns or suggesting a different approach to the usefulness of the experience in the first place. Business wants a designer who has a process which substantiates their output; a smart, talented, non self-referential designer, able to take their domain (the business) into account when designing interfaces.

Okay. Fair enough.

So designers expose their craft, expose their thought processes, expose their methodologies to businesses and product teams in order to show that they get it. Seasoned designers are able to have a conversation about a business model; they can talk shop with engineers; they can subjugate their own system design preferences in order to understand the needs of the end user and the possibilities that lie beyond the present implementation model. The aforementioned approaches aren’t options to the craft; these are the multi-disciplinary skill sets required for the role.

Well, in steps technology with skin in the game to spare. “Innovation comes from rapid iterations of features” they say. “Okay” the designer adds, “Let’s just make sure we’re focusing on the right features, useful to people.” Instantly, product management begins to cringe, project managers start to steel up, cats sleep with dogs, etc.

Remember that the intent of crafting an interface is to create a representational model that reflects, as close as possible, the end user’s mental model regarding the goal and tasks at hand, not as an implementation model of the existing technology. So why is this method of getting to the interface so scary? Why is it so terrible to actually talk to “outside” people about product concepts? Designers create user archetype(s) and scenarios to represent the potential user base and their needs and desires in a product. If the synthesized findings confirm internal product vision, they can then be translated by the design team to craft interface behavior. This is how refined, holistic user interfaces are created across a single product, an entire domain and even into external product and brand communication. This is a cross-team, collaborative process which may or may not fine-tune the product offering, but definitely will improve the behavior of the user interface.

So is the hesitation from the fear of leaks to competition? There are ways to perform research without letting on who you are and even the concept of the actual product. And it can be done rather quickly. Or does the hesitation stem from a more human place; personal competition and the perceived loss of skin in the game?

If my non-designer colleagues in this field believe that user experience design begins and ends at the interface level, where it gets pretty, then I guess I understand the hesitation to leverage our methods. Maybe us design types should “just get drunk and throw paint on the canvas.”

Personally, I’m going to stick to my seltzer and keep asking questions.

We at Datek are only a few months away (hopefully) from signing on the dotted line and merging with Ameritrade. A major result of that milestone will include a re-architecture of the two discrete sites into one new user experience; a forward-thinking trading platform. In expectation of that date, our marketing group has been doing a great job in gathering user data (video tapes of user interaction with the two existing sites, focus group feedback, etc.) and we — the user experience design team — are about to embark on the first step of the the planning process; creating the first stab of an evolving bible of Ameritrade/Datek personas.

Before I started work on designing Command Center, personas were not part of the software design process at Datek. During the initial stage of the project, I contacted a friend of mine (CCO of Onclave, Dave Reid) to borrow a persona template. After mind-melding with Dave and then internally with our marketing department, I came up with two detailed personas two reflect our active trading customer base. Sure, they’re not based on personal interviews with clients, but as stakes in the ground, the tangible reference of human personas consistantly assisted me in the design of the product and proved to be worth the effort.

The shift of our software design process, from a business centered to user centered, has grabbed huge traction over the last few months, and I feeling that the change in approach will positively affect our customers interaction with the Winter ‘03 site launch.