Personas and archetypes

by pree on January 18, 2009

Over the weekend I was reading/rereading about personas and archetypes.

With personas being used and misused during product development, we just seemed to have put too many “how not to” and “how to” for personas. There is a detailed book as well. Somewhere along time, we seem to have lost the real motivation for making personas. Personas need to go back to it’s roots of simple, empathy to become a good decision making tool.

Most of you guys who live in the US know Trader Joe’s. For those who don’t it is a national chain of grocery stores that sell good quality food for a reasonable price. These stores are usually small and hence they carry a limited number of items in the store. They make a profit every year. How do they do it. They have a very simple way to empowering everybody in their organization to make the right decisions.  It’s by asking a single question “Will an unemployed, college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo buy this?”. If the answer is yes, they stock it. This is from HBR Dec 2006

Amazing!

How can I apply something like this in other domains like technology. Let me try to analyze what is really good about the good old professor:

  • It is emotional enough that everybody can feel empathy.
  • It is simple enough that the information hidden in the one sentence does not get lost when you are under pressure to make a million decisions.
  • Everybody in the chain from the purchaser to the exec uses and permeates this framework to make decisions

Empathy first:
Early on during the Product development I need to create empathy for my target user (who is very different from me). The only way I can do it is by making stories emotional. I need to feel like this is my aunt living in Boise.

Information next:
Simple, visual articulation, the data is pushed out into the appendix. Its for the people who will dig in, not for the people who have been forced to dig in. I know of a company that made persona posters that had spelling errors because even the researcher who made the personas did not read through all the detail :). Best if I can make it tweetable.

Design for viral:
How can I make it permiate through the organization. Execs need a mantra to repeat at every all hands. Project managers need a quick yes or no answer and don’t have time to consult research.

Please feel free to comment or email…

photo credits: andybardill

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Co-creation and why should you care

by pree on December 18, 2008

Co-creation is all the buzz in many industries. What is it anyway and how do we benefit from it?

What is Co-creation?: Its collaborative creation or collective creation of the product or service by all of the stakeholders involved. this term became very popular after it was the subject of several books.

The best metaphor for co-creation that I have heard is of communal folk music. There are a troupe of musicians who are playing music in the village grounds. People are singing along. Some others are making noises… some one else is humming. A few young guys and gals jump in and starts dancing. Some even play an instrument or two. Everybody is participating. There is a no clear separation between the artist and the audience. Everybody becomes part of the creation by just being in the space.

Now imagine a global village of participants. They are not just audience or consumers any more. Yes it seems massively chaotic and the equation of power is changing. It is really about changing the core of the product and not just personalizing it.

How can we start co-creating and fitting it in to a product development process. If you are media facilitator its a little bit straight forward. You setup a framework or scaffold for people to create content and allow them to communicate and collaborate. Then market the hell out of it and hope everything works. It’s a little bit different for most of the companies out there.

You can start the co-creation process early in the development process by giving some of the same tools that is available to designers and engineers. Of course simplifying it down to bare minimum. These can be called tools for building future scenarios. The product development team usually starts with a product and then looks for future scenarios. People look at their life, their dreams and then look for future scenarios. Both valid approaches to innovation and coming from opposite sides. The intersection is usually where breakthrough innovation happens

I’ll write more about the participatory mindset in my next post.

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The mindset and the framework

December 8, 2008

People inspired innovation means a lateral shift of mindset for several people who in the past believed that innovation happens because of extreme creativity of an individual or a highly talented team.
The future is about putting the person, the user or the customer at the heart of the solution. This new paradigm in design will [...]

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