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Buzzkill
Alternate dimensions
An Insurgency of Quality
The parable of The Homer
Even after you’ve sold them on personas, even after you’ve explained that you want to design for a specific persona first, even after you warned them about the perils of the “elastic user,” you can find yourself hearing things like, “Well, I know this guy who would do it this way...”
To help clients who won't be put off by pop-culture references, I reference the parable of The Homer.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Simpsons episode “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” (Season 2, Episode 15), it plays out like this: Homer meets his long lost brother Herb, who happens to head an automobile company. Believing Homer to be the perfect “everyman,” Herb instructs his designers to make exactly the car that Homer wants.
If it needs saying, Homer is something of a moron, and the resulting car he “designs” is something like this:
The Homer: Powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a Nerf ball (props to Carlos Bisquertt for this 3D model of the cartoon version.)
As you can imagine, this monstrosity that features tail fins, bubble domes, shag carpeting, and multiple horns that play “La Cucaracha,” ruins Herb’s company.
The moral is of course that designing for almost any single individual runs a huge risk of building a product around personal idiosyncrasies — the things that are different about that person, which is a lot different than designing for personas or user archetypes where the goal is to make decisions focused on the commonalities between members of the intended audience.
Filed under: Communicating design, Research
Chris Noessel is a senior consultant at Cooper. His industry experience ranges from owning a small, museum-focused company in Houston to working with Microsoft's futures prototyping group in Seattle. For marchFIRST he was Director of Information Architecture, conducting research and design for notable web sites such as Apple, SEGA, and Harmon Kardon. He was one of the founding graduates of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He teaches interaction design at the California College of the Arts.
More entries by Chris
Comments
:) I can picture him riding down a slide in a playground trying to unlock the thing.
We face this "quote" effect in research, too. We pepper our research findings with quotes from stakeholders and users, and the most interesting ones aren't always the most representative.
very recognizable :)
and unless the one user is steve jobs it will likely be a monstrosity.
This story also nicely fits the dilemma we also face in testing. If you test with one user it is like designing for one.
If you test with multiple there is this sense of safety (oh I have an intersubjective poll of opinions). We see this every day.
Yet still the individual comments out of this pool tends to be introduced now with much more self confidence than should be. Since a single comment out of 8 or 15 or 35 is still a single comment.
So apart from the design for a person(a) there is also the risk of change for the one user test.
Would be good if we make similar parables on that risk. Imagine if Homer were to test the iPhone?!