The book "Mental Hospital in the hands of patients. Alan Cooper on Interfaces »

All of us are insane living in a technological insane asylum, and we ourselves created this crazy world. They have done this nightmare with their own hands: interfaces that annoy us and weary our eyes, devices that lead to back and wrist pain. This book became a manifesto and still has not lost its relevance. The door to freedom is wide open. Why do we not notice the exit? This is what Alan Cooper says, explaining the difference between the interface and the interaction.

Design for one person only.

When creating a product that is designed to meet the needs of a wide audience of users, logic usually prompts to endow it with extensive functionality to cover as many people as possible. In this case, the logic is wrong. Your product will become much more successful if you design it only for one person.

Imagine that you are going to design a car that would appeal to a wide range of buyers. You can easily select at least three target segments: mommies, who always carry their children to sports clubs, carpenters and young managers. Mom wants to have a reliable, safe car, spacious inside and certainly with large doors - to fit everything: children, dogs, bags from the supermarket and much more. Joe Carpenter would like to get a durable four-wheel drive vehicle and plenty of space for transporting ladders, wood, cement bags and tools. Seth, a young manager, wants to have a sports car in which there must be a powerful engine, a stiff suspension, convertible top and space for just two.

If we proceed from the considerations of logic, the solution may look like in the figure above. This is a combination of the wishes of each of our three drivers: a convertible van, a spacious lounge for children, and a place to transport wood. What an awkward, unimaginable car turned out! Even if it really can be designed, no one would want to buy it. The right thing would be to design a minivan for mommy, a pickup for carpenter Jo and a sports car for manager Set.
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With regard to software development, creating three different programs is much easier than designing three cars. One software product can always be implemented in such a way that there are three “engines” inside it and it has the behavior of three different products (with one observation: you cannot blame the process of configuring such a program on the user).

Every time you expand the functionality of the program in an attempt to cover another user segment, you put all the other users on the way extra barriers of options and controls. You will soon find out that opportunities designed to make some users happy hinder the enjoyment of others. Trying to please users with too different needs, you simply kill a potentially good product. Conversely, if you narrow down the diversity of opportunities for the needs of one person, nothing else can prevent her happiness.

Robert Lutz, chairman of the board of Chrysler, said that about 80% of the drivers who participated in the focus groups felt extreme dislike for the new Dodge Ram pickup. Nevertheless, the car was put into production and became the best-selling car due to the fact that the remaining 20% ​​just fell in love with it. To make people love your product, even if it is in the minority, is the secret that will lead you to success.

The larger the target, the less chances you have to get right "in the bull's eye." If your goal is to increase the level of satisfaction with the product to 50%, you will not be able to do this, making everyone from the general wide audience happy only by 50%. This can be achieved only by allocating 50% of users from this circle, and make each of them 100% happy. But that's not all. You will achieve even greater success if you focus only on 10% of your market segment, but cause them to be one hundred percent ecstasy. This approach seems paradoxical, but designing for a single user is the most effective way to make a wide audience satisfied with your product.

Suitcase on wheels and stickers

A good example of how effective design can be for one person is a suitcase on wheels. Once this small size suitcase with retractable wheels and a folding handle made a small revolution in the whole baggage industry, while it was not designed for everyone. Initially, it was intended only for the crew of aircraft - a very narrow segment of the audience. The simplicity of the device of this product fully satisfied the needs of this group of consumers. However, pretty soon the rest of the travelers felt the beauty of using such a suitcase. It was convenient to transport it through the crowded airport lounges, as well as to maneuver with it in narrow aisles of the aircraft or to be laid in the luggage compartment.

After the suitcase on wheels earned success with its target audience, it was brought to other markets. Today you can see on sale luggage on wheels of a larger size, designer, armored and children's luggage on wheels. Nowadays, finding a suitcase without sliding wheels and a folding handle is no longer so easy.

And here's another example, as an engineer for adhesive materials of 3M, Art Fry, accidentally invented one of the most useful and popular office accessories to date, trying to solve his own very specific problems. When Art Fry sang in the church choir, paper bookmarks were constantly falling out of the psalter, which caused him to go astray every time. Art Fry did not want to spoil church property with adhesive tape, therefore he began to search for a more suitable solution. He recalled that several years before he had been working on the creation of adhesive material, which in the end was not put into production due to the insufficiently high adhesion strength coefficient. Art covered with this failed material the surface of small sheets of yellow paper and made bookmarks of them. This is how 3M Post-It Note stickers came into being.

Satisfied users are an incredibly valuable and rewarding asset. By focusing on a narrower circle of consumers, you get a chance to acquire truly loyal fans from your target segment. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Customer Disloyalty, loyal customers are those who will be your best support in difficult times. They are not just rolling mountains and wading all the rivers to get your product, but they are also an incredibly effective marketing tool ever known, because they will personally recommend you to their friends. By creating a stir around your product, you can use it to conquer other segments of the market.

Gutta percha user

And while our goal is to meet the needs of the user, the term “user” itself presents some problem. The uncertainty of this term makes it as useless as a chainsaw is useless for removing an appendix. For the design we need a more accurate tool.

When I heard the term “user” from someone, it usually sounded like a “gutta-percha user” - that is, a person who is forced to bend, stretch and adjust to the needs of the moment. However, these programs should bend, stretch and adapt to the user's tasks - that’s what our goal should be. Programmers write an infinite number of programs, focusing on this mythical gutta-percha user, although its elementary does not exist. When a programmer considers it permissible to plunge a user into the abyss of the Windows file system to search for any data, he regards the gutta-percha user as a reasonable person with computer literacy and able to adapt to the situation. Or another case - when a programmer considers it permissible to lead a user through some complicated operation with the help of a stupid wizard, he regards the gutta-percha user as a submissive, naive, inexperienced beginner. Designing such gutta-percha users unleashes the developer’s hands, allowing them to write, as they see fit, hypocritically asserting that they do it “for the user”. Your real users are not gutta-percha.

Programmers have an impressive system on how to design software. A good programmer will not scatter coarse generalizations about different computers and systems. You cannot hear from him: "On a computer, this will work well." What kind of computer are we talking about? What model? What operating system? What peripherals? Also, the designer should not say that “the programs are designed for the user” or “the program will be user-friendly”. When you hear such words, they seem to be an excuse for imposing the developer’s own interests.

In our design process, we never talk about such an abstract “user”; we mean a completely concrete image: a person.

Be specific

The more specifically we prescribe the characteristics of persons, the more effective they are in the design process. This is because, with greater detail, they lose their “gutta-percha”. For example, in describing Emily’s person, we don’t say that “she is using the office suite”; we specifically mean that "she uses WordPerfect version 5.1 to write letters to her grandmother." We can't let Emily just go to work. No, she must “drive to work on a 1991 model's dark blue Toyota Camry, with a plastic gray child car seat installed and an ugly scratch on the rear bumper.” And Emily's job is not just work. Emily "holds the position of Global Airways account opening specialist - Memphis, Tennessee, her workplace is in a compartment with beige partitions." This detailed feature is an incredibly powerful tool in the design and communication process. Thus, each of our persons is described in the most careful way, as concretely as possible.

As soon as we endow Emily with unique features, an amazing thing happens: in the view of designers and programmers, she becomes a very real person. We can call her by name, and then she acquires an even more tangible essence, allowing developers to evaluate the intended results of the design from her point of view. As Emily becomes less and less gutta-percha, her skills, her motivation and goals, which she wants to achieve, begin to show. Armed with an understanding of this, we can study it in the light of the subject area of ​​our program and determine whether it can actually be considered the archetype of the user. Having carried out a similar procedure several times and having obtained a certain experience, the designer is then able to correctly form the images of people from the very first time.

Giving a person a name is one of the most important steps for successfully identifying it. A person who does not have a name is simply useless. In this case, no one will consider it a specific real person.

With other things being equal, I try to include people of different races, gender, nationalities and skin color in the composition of people. Nevertheless, I prefer to use images of typical representatives of any segment of the audience, since the reverse situation can only introduce unnecessary confusion. The stereotyped person is good if due to this the images become more authentic. Compliance with political correctness is not my goal here - I need everyone to believe in the reality of these people. Be my person a carer, I’m more likely to make her female than male, but not because men do not work as carers, but because the overwhelming majority of people in this occupation are women. If we describe the user as a “computer technician,” then a person will appear as “Nick, a pimply youngster of twenty-three years old, a former member of the school club of audio and video fans”, rather than “Helena, a high handsome beauty who attended a private school in Beverly Hills . The credibility of images is important to me, not diversity.

To make the person even more realistic in the presentation of the project participants, I usually associate descriptions with a visual image — I add an image to each person. I usually buy these images for a small fee on the network photo stocks, however several times I have used quick pencil sketches for this. Photos, if you want, can be cut and from magazines.

Fully described, concretized persona with visual embodiment is a very powerful tool. Until the user finds such precise characteristics, programmers will imagine that users are like them, or consider them gutta-percha. The explicitly defined person of the user is your key to successfully overcoming the developers' tendency to distort or neglect the user's characteristics. Long before the very first line of code is written, a qualitative description of the user's persona will become an unusually effective interaction design tool.

»More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
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