Using Profiles

The process of creating profiles can be useful by itself. It creates a set of documents that communicate a shared understanding of users, their perspectives, and their problems. However, to get the full benefit from the process, the profiles need to remain in use. They should be documented, shared, updated, and used in everyday product development.

Document

Teaching the whole team about the profiles and how to use them is the best way to ensure that the work remains useful in the long run. Not all the people using a profile will have been part of the group that developed it, and even those who were will need reminders.

The documentation you create should be a distillation of what you have created. Even though you may have developed large, involved character studies as part of the profiling process, the final product should be short, easily readable, and focused on the specific needs of the project.

Since a user profile is a concise communication tool, you should first determine the audience for your profiles so that you can present the profiles appropriately. Different groups will have different needs: identity design deals with branding, engineering with technical constraints, business development with partnerships and competitors, and interaction design with the functionality and organization of features. The document you create should reflect the needs and concerns of its audience.

Everybody on the team will need to know about what people are trying to accomplish, the problems they have, their desires, important behaviors, and the roles they play. A basic profile will contain the following elements:

• The name of the profile

• A demographic description

• The profiled person's goals

• His or her needs

• His or her abilities

• His or her perspective on the task and the product

In addition, other groups will have specific needs because of the way they use profiles (Table 7.2).

Table 7.2: SOME NEEDS OF IN-HOUSE USER PROFILE AUDIENCES

Audience	Information Needs
Identity design	Models of the users' associations and emotional responses to the brand
Business development	Potential complementary and competitive products and services
Interaction design	Usage goals, specific tasks, usage patterns
Information architecture	Familiar task domains and known naming schemes
Engineering	Primarily Web use and technological capabilities, but also usage goals, specific tasks, and usage patterns

A portrait is the final element. An image that represents a real person adds a human touch to the profile and makes it seem more "real" than a textual description. Also, the process of finding just the right picture can crystallize many of the decisions that you've made. Some product teams keep a picture of their primary user profiles in a frame near their work area, where a picture of "Our President" would have hung 100 years ago. Many create posters with the picture and key attributes of the user (designing them as Old West-style "Wanted" posters). Others give them their own cube, where everything that relates to a profile (and consequently to the project) is displayed. This reinforces that there are real people who depend on you every day. Moreover, picking a picture is fun and can be a good way to wrap up a long brainstorming session.

Warning

Never use pictures or names of people you know when creating a profile. Or, for that matter, never base a profile on someone you know. It's distracting and restrictive when it's time to extend or change the profile ("But Charlie doesn't own a car!").

Find a source of stock photos (your design department may have some CDs or you can get one from a royalty-free Web stock photo site such as PhotoDisc). They contain pictures of many different people who no one on your team knows. Walk through them together until you find one that says "Doris!" and then make that the face of Doris.

Share

The most challenging part of sharing user profiles is communicating them in a succinct yet useful way. The best dissemination method will depend on the size and makeup of the development team. Smaller teams can be part of the profile specification process itself or can work with someone who was. Larger teams will need to have more formal documentation methods.

An introduction meeting, however, is a useful step for teams of any size. The creation process should be described to the whole team and the profiles introduced. Describing how this specific set of profiles was created and walking through the key characteristics of each profile will ground the profiles and reinforce their function as useful abstractions.

Summarize the profiles in an easily usable form. San Francisco-based design firm Hot Studio creates a one-page "digest" version of their profiles, which is laminated (according to Cooper's suggestion) and given to everyone on the development team. That way everyone will always have the profiles available. The lamination makes them more durable, easier to find in a stack of papers, and less likely to get thrown out by accident.

Although you can share a lot of information, there is always going to be more information than everyone can remember. A profile wrangler (or profile keeper) position can be useful for centralizing the information. The wrangler is present during the profile creation process and is responsible for keeping profiles updated. He or she also serves as a resource for interpreting profiles to the development team ("What would Jeff think about a Palm Pilot download option?").

Note

This chapter concentrates on the creation of user profiles; it does not deal with the specifics of integrating them into your development process. For an excellent treatment of how profiling dovetails with software design and business development, see Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

Develop with Profiles

It's easy to go through the process of developing a set of profiles and then never use them again. In order for the profiles to remain useful, they need to be actively used. Most immediately, they can serve as bases for recruiting screeners (though they're too specific to use entirely: you generally want more variety than a roomful of Dorises). More important, you should encourage the development staff to talk using profiles during meetings and to think about how features work for the various profiles.

One of the easiest ways to get people thinking in terms of profiles is to use the profile names in your documentation and specs. For example, when describing a new feature, discuss how it would help Jeff or Sammy and how you think they would approach it.

Use profiles to evaluate your competitors. Go to a competitor's site and try to determine which profile they're creating for. Try to identify how your profiles would use the site. Whom would the sites be attractive to? Why? Where do they succeed? Where do they fail?

Of course, not all aspects of your profiles will be useful or used. Sometimes you may spend a lot of time developing a certain profile or a set of scenarios only to discover that some minor facet is much more useful than the whole thing. This is normal and typical. Don't regret the other work you did; just leave it as background information.

Regularly Update

Profiles should be sanity checked and updated on a regular basis.

For example, at first you decide that Doris is a 45-year-old mother of two. But when you run a survey, you discover that there aren't many 40-something women in your user base who fit the rest of Doris's profile. It mostly consists of 50-somethings who have grown children or no children at all. Since Doris's age and the number of children she has are not critical to the product, you can just change her profile. Now she's 55 and has grown kids. Conversely, if you discover that there are almost no businesses like hers in the bank's existing customers, you may want to shift emphasis and concentrate on a more representative profile.

As you're doing other research, compare people who match the general description of your profiles. If you find that many people don't match your idea, adjust the profile to reflect the actual user base.

If you have time, you may also want to sanity-check your profiles with some interviews. Recruit people who match your user markets and interview them, concentrating on your previous assumptions about their behavior and values. How well do they fit your idea of what that market is like? If there are big discrepancies, adjust the profile (but before you make large adjustments, interview a few more people from that market to verify that the differences are consistent and substantial).

You may also want to consider how the user experience will change with time. What happens to Doris after she's used the service regularly for six months? What happens after a year? What happens if, one day, she finds that the site has been redesigned? The original group can meet on a regular basis (every six months or so) to consider how new information has altered your understanding of profiles and how your profiles' goals, reactions, and needs have changed with time.