Chapter 7: User Profiles

Overview

"Who's going to use your product?"

"Everyone!"

"And what will they do with it?"

"Everything!"

As technology and bandwidth allowed for real-time voice communication over the Internet, a bunch of companies entered the market to promote and develop it. Many decided to aim big; otherwise, the reasoning went, why aim at all? When asked about who would use their product, an executive at one of these companies replied, "Everyone who uses a telephone!"

Although at the time that was a great ambition to have, and a good story to tell investors, the group of people who would have been likely to use an Internet telephone in 1998 was a lot smaller than "everyone who uses a telephone." By defining the audience so broadly, they were, in effect, not defining it at all. Of course, they could have claimed to be happy if they captured a small fraction of the large market, but that reasoning would have been equally flawed. Aiming for a small share of a large market would have created an impossible task for the company. To capture even a small piece of a big market, they would have needed to understand the dynamics of the whole market. There are a lot of telephone users in the world. To understand the market they had so flippantly defined, the Internet telephone companies would need to know the needs, abilities, and desires of a large chunk of the world's population—in a 1.0 product.

The company in question eventually realized that they would have to focus their efforts. After trying to make a completely generic product and failing, they settled on a more focused audience definition, but only after spending a long time working on features that most of their (few) users didn't care for and that didn't make sense when taken together with the rest of the product.

This is where user profiles would have been valuable. When you create user profiles (or personas, as Alan Cooper, founder of Cooper Interaction Design, a major innovator and proponent of the technique, calls it), you create one or more fictitious users and try to model them and their lives. From general characteristics, you model specific individuals who would buy and use your stuff. Each final profile is a tool that helps you define and compare your ideal with reality. Role playing with user profiles can reveal functionality and needs that would be difficult to uncover otherwise, while adding a dose of reality to product feature brainstorming sessions ("Keeping the 'nifty factor' down," as Christina Wodtke, senior interaction designer at Yahoo!, puts it). User profiles allow you to focus on specific images of users that everyone on the team can reference and use as sounding boards for development ideas. They're also much simpler to work with than "everyone."

The bulk of this book is about understanding who your users are, what they can do, and what they want. That information is going to guide your product in the long run, but even before you start collecting hard data, you should begin focusing on the user and his or her experience. In user profiling, you model your users based on your intuition, your judgment, and the information you have at hand. This quickly gives you insight into what makes a good user experience and can keep your product out of the "everything for everyone" trap. Profiles provide a conceptual envelope to work in and benchmarks against which to focus the rest of your research. When you follow up with surveys, contextual inquiry, or user tests, you have a model with which to compare your results.

Except for the fact that they're fictional, your user profiles are people whom you will get to know, to spend time with, to like. They are more than just a face put on a list of demographic data; they are entities whom you work with to make a better product.