Imaginary customers

Designing a successful user experience requires a clear understanding of your audience –their wants, needs, likes, dislikes and likely behaviours. Put together, this information forms a user profile.

If your project has sufficient time and budget, a range of focus groups composed of people who fit the user profile (and there may be more than one) can be used to inform your initial designs and then test each stage of design development. Insights from focus group testing can be used to refine the design and make sure that it resonates with your target audience.

However, if time and budget are unavailable, even a little audience research goes a long way. One of the simplest and cost-effective ways of gaining insight into your audience is to use an imaginary user profile, or persona, created from desk research, project knowledge and a little common sense.

The level of detail that is required will vary depending on the nature of your project, but creating a relevant persona means that you and your team always have a touchpoint to refer to when designing. This helps make sure that design decisions remain in line with the needs and expectations of your audience.

The idea is to be able to imagine how a particular user will interact with your design. So if your audience has been identified as a young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs), your persona will outline their likely personality attributes, esteem, sense of belonging, security, and physical needs (based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

• Identify the main audience types by talking to your client and researching their customer base at the start of the project.
• Create a shortlist of attributes including demographics (age, education, gender, location, profession) and psychology (attitude, interests, lifestyle, personality).
• Encourage empathy by giving each persona a name (and a stock photo also helps to bring it to life).
• Share the user profiles with your client and project team.

This fictional user profile represents your audience, and depending on the type of project, you may need three, four or five personas that reflect the range of your audience.

You can now imagine how your personas would interact with a piece of information and use the insight gained to help refine your design and make sure it meets the needs of your audience.

Behavioural science

Behavioural science and behavioural economics show us that, very often, we do not behave in ways we would expect to if we were perfectly ‘rational’ human beings. Many of us still have not insulated our lofts, despite the fact that doing so will reduce our energy bills; we very rarely switch our bank accounts, despite the fact that we may benefit from higher saving rates elsewhere; and we may not yet have committed to becoming an organ donor, despite the fact that the majority of us would be willing to do so if asked.

Many of today’s issues have a strong behavioural component. From tackling anti-social behaviour, to education and health – our behaviours as citizens, parents and neighbours significantly affect the quality of our lives and that of others.

We can influence people’s behaviour in a number of different ways. Tough laws can be made, with fines for those who fail to comply with new legislation, or bans can be introduced that prevent people from eating certain types of food or engaging in particular types of activities.

This is where advertising and design can make a difference. We can give citizens more or better information. We can prompt people to make choices that are in line with their underlying motivations. And we can help to encourage social norms around healthier behaviours in ways that avoid inadvertently communicating that the ‘problem behaviour’ – rioting or driving whilst using a mobile phone or dropping litter – is relatively widespread.

And, if we know anything from behavioural science, it is that behaviour is strongly influenced by what we think others are up to.

Governments, businesses and charities are using the behavioural change MINDSPACE framework to support advertising and design decision-making that impacts upon the behaviour of citizens.

M I N D S P A C E
Messenger  – We are heavily influenced by who communicates information
Incentives -– Our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses
Norms – We are strongly influenced by what others do
Defaults – We ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options
Salience – Our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
Priming – Our acts are often influenced by subconscious cues
Affect – Our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
Commitment – We seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts
Ego – We act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves

For example, exercise is strongly affected by our tendency to discount future
gains, such as being fit and feeling good, relative to short-term pains. Turn this
problem around, such as by introducing an immediate pleasure through the fun of
the Stockholm Metro piano stairs (affect and salience). Making the stairs
eye-catching and fun to climb also had a motivating effect, in that once more people started taking the stairs, others tended to follow.

Or by changing the social norm around exercise with the London city bike hire scheme Seeing more people cycle creates a new social norm and visual prompt, encouraging more people to want to cycle.

In most cases, success will not come from a single design intervention. Instead it will come from a combined approach between many partners – local communities, professionals, businesses and citizens themselves.

A key objective is to try out a range of behavioural approaches – to experiment at local level – to find the most effective ways communicating and of ‘nudging’ citizens lifestyles in ways that make it easy for them to adopt 'good' behaviours.

Nine box brainstorming

A great technique for quickly generating ideas is to use nine-box brainstorming.

Draw a grid of nine boxes – like noughts and crosses (tic tac toe if you’re in the US) – and put your subject in the centre box.

Now fill the eight boxes that surround the centre box with ideas, one idea per box.

Take each idea, and place it in the middle of a new nine-box grid. Into each of the eight surrounding boxes put either a development of the idea or a visual treatment.

That’s 64 possible routes within 30 minutes.

Character archetypes and patterning

Thanks to Dr Janis Wilson from Archetypology for a fascinating presentation at Wednesday’s Language Consultancy Association event, The Archetypology of Brands.

Archetypes are derived from neuroscience, psychology and classical studies. Essentially they are groups of certain personality traits and behaviours that can be recognised, categorised and expressed as a persona.

These personality traits and behaviours are laid down in the subconscious brain as ‘loose patterns’. The power of these loose patterns is that the brain is programmed to respond to stimuli that are a close fit. If your message is a close fit to the pattern, it triggers a response that requires fulfillment. If your brand offers this fulfillment, then the loose pattern is reinforced in a feedback loop that is now conditioned by your brand message.

In simple terms, you can use a structure of 12 classic archetypal characters – Innocent, Regular guy, Caregiver, Explorer, Hero, Outlaw, Lover, Creator, Ruler, Sage, Jester and Magician - to describe both your customers and your brand. In theory, if you know what your brand character is, and whom you want to talk to, adopting the correct tone of voice for a conversation between the two archetypes triggers this patterning and helps you to deliver your message. The key is to use the appropriate language between brand and audience archetypes to trigger the loose patterning in the subconscious.

Where it gets interesting is the knowledge that people move through all 12 archetypes at different life stages (although they will have a preferred archetype that they return to), whilst successful brands tend to stick with the same archetypal character.

Then it gets more complicated.

Each archetype has a number of sub-archetypes, and within these are a number of different, sometimes opposing behaviours.

So character archetypes can have a dark side. When a brand expression loses its way it tends to exhibit these opposing behaviours. This could explain why successful brands, for example, British Airways, BP, Coca-Cola, Gap, sometimes get it so wrong. The message no longer resonates as it disrupts the expected pattern. Returning to their archetypal character normally sees the brand refreshed and revitalised as the fit with the audience archetype loose pattern is restored.

As brand strategists, brand managers and copywriters, you can leverage these patterns to connect with and influence your customers.

Chickens and eggs

An interesting way of describing the relationship between a brand, a campaign and a creative brief courtesy of TBWA London’s Executive Creative Director Dede Laurentino at MediaPro 2011.

Think of a chicken laying an egg.

Think of the chicken being the big idea and an egg being the creative expression of that idea.

A big idea serves a brand in all its expressions, whether they are internally facing (like newsletters or HR policy etc.), or externally facing (like posters, TV, website etc.). A big idea produces any number of eggs for the lifetime of the campaign.

However, a creative brief only addresses one element of the brand, one egg at a time.

But surely for a campaign to work, the same creative expression must apply to all eggs so that everything looks the same?

No.

And I can give you 26 reasons why not.

Think of an alphabet.

There are 26 different letters in the alphabet. In different fonts. In different colours. 26 different creative briefs.

Put them together and they still work to deliver a message. An integrated campaign. On brand.

If the letters are all the same beautifully crafted letter ‘A’, in the same font, in the same colour, then there is consistency. But there is no communication.

So no matter how many different creative treatments are produced, they all need to remain true to the big idea. To the brand.

That is why the big idea is like a chicken.

Allow a chicken to thrive, and you’ll keep getting new eggs.

It’s the chicken that comes first, not the egg.

Stylesheets

One of the recurring issues I’ve had when designing a document is the inability of people to use stylesheets to structure their content.

I’m no longer surprised at the number of clients who cannot, or will not, use stylesheets in Word (“I haven’t got the time to learn all that – can’t you do it for me”), but I continue to be amazed at the number of designers who cannot, or will not, use stylesheets in InDesign/Quark Xpress (‘It cramps my creativity – can’t the setters sort it out”).

I was reminded of this during a recent software presentation that promised to map Word documents into InDesign and then automatically output to print, PDF, web, tablet and mobile. The software used a combination of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and application/device stylesheets, and I have to admit it was pretty fast.

The problem was, that for the system to work effectively, the content in the original (Word) document needed to be structured in the first place – and without that, the mapping software could not map.

(Of course InDesign already has a built in XML tagging option that enables tagged content to be manually repurposed in another file or application. Similarly, you can import an XML file into InDesign and instruct InDesign to display and format the XML data in any way you want.)

To get the benefit of ‘design once, publish many times’, you need to be able to separate the visual style from the document structure – a principle that will be familiar to you if you are used to using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in web design.

The same principle holds true for traditional print publishing, and now that Word 11 has improved the way styles work, including adding a ‘Show Styles’ option that interprets levels of heading (even if an outline heading level has not been specified), there really is no excuse for not structuring documents properly.

Doing this at the beginning of the process means that Word styles can be mapped to InDesign styles using tags, and in the same way, tags can be carried across into Acrobat for creating accessible PDFs or HTML for use online on tablet or other mobile devices.

The whole point of technology is that you use it to make your workflow more efficient, leaving you more time to design.

Better, faster, cheaper.

That’s the future.

The Power of Making

‘Alphabet’, pencil-tip structures, Dalton Ghetti, USA.
Photo by Sloan T. Howard Photography

And so to the Power of Making exhibition at the V&A. Making is the most powerful way that we solve problems, express ideas and shape our world. What and how we make defines who we are, and communicates who we want to be.

For designers, making is a chosen vocation: a way of thinking, inventing and innovating. It’s a delight to be able to shape a material and say ‘I made that’.

I particularly liked the way materials have been juxtaposed so that the soft ‘fur’ of an animal or dress is composed of hard metal, or a robot exoskeleton made of wood.

Every object in this exhibition has been made by adding, subtracting or transforming material, or by combining these processes.

Many people think that craft is a matter of executing a preconceived form or idea, something that already exists in the mind or on paper. Yet making is also an active way of thinking, something which can be carried out with no particular goal in mind. In fact, this is a situation where innovation is very likely to occur.

Even when making is experimental and open-ended, it observes rules and structure. Craft always involves parameters, imposed by materials, tools, scale and the physical body of the maker. Sometimes in making, things go wrong. An unskilled maker, hitting the limits of their ability, might just stop. An expert, though, will find a way through the problem, constantly unfolding new possibilities within the process.