As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's personas are either zombies, or about to become so.

That zombie that kind of looks like an undead Crispin Glover

Background:

That zombie that kind of looks like an undead Crispin Glover was resting peacefully in his grave when he awoke with a powerful hunger. In spite of his mostly-decayed flesh, he was able to push his way to the surface to begin his (second) life of mayhem.

The bulk of this zombie's time is spent gathering brains to eat. What should be a simple activity is complicated by the fact that most humans are reluctant to share.

When not eating brains, this zombie spends the bulk of his time shufflin’, shufflin’.

How we can help the zombie that kind of looks like an undead Crispin Glover:

• Use flashing lights and recorded human sounds to guide him in the right directions
• Provide interaction cues that are hard to miss. Really hard to miss.
• Make it possible to interact with very crude gestures and two, one, or no arms.

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today’s personas are Antone and Vladimir.

Antone D’Entremont, tortured soul

Background:

Antone grew up in southern Louisiana in the late 1700s, the son of a wealthy landowner. After his childhood sweetheart died, he gave up all hope for life. He told his troubles to a young gentleman who came through town, who promised him an end to Antone’s misery. Instead, he was turned to a vampire, and forced to live a life of eternal suffering, unable to visit his family ever again. Today he broods away his evenings in his family’s decaying plantation.

Challenges with technology:

• Preferring the quill and ink of his childhood, Antone has never gotten the knack of using a keyboard.

How we can help Antone:

• Provide a social interface for finding like-minded souls
• Offer an intuitive interface that does not require calls to tech support (he can’t really call during normal business hours)
• Automatic alerts when his loved ones are in harm's way

Vladimir Korzha, bloodthirsty bat

Background:

Vladimir, known as “Vlad” to his vampire offspring, grew up as a Romanian prince in the early 1400’s. After the tragic killing of his entire family by vengeful serfs, he vowed to devote his life to avenge their death. Vlad was turned to a vampire by a Romani witch during one of his bloody killing sprees. He was thrilled when he realized that his new powers would allow him to continue his killing spree through time immemorial. Today he works as a night watchman in a hospital.

Challenges with technology:

• Vlad gives in to his passions quickly, which takes him away from technology. Any interface must offer quick hits and just-in-time, glanceable information.

How we can help Vladimir:

• Provide a locational interface for locating “willing” prey
• Offer a non-reflective screen, so his co-workers will not realize he has no reflection
• A small, portable interface that fits underwing and works in low light conditions

Next persona Zombie, Zombie, & Emily
Prior persona Romulus: North American Woodland Ape
Unwilling victims: Jim Dibble and Greg Schuler.
Special thanks to Flickr user craigCloutier for the CC use of this image
and to Flickr user Alex Holzknecht for the CC use of this image

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Romulus.

Background:

Romulus has long been the subject of intense curiosity among outdoorsmen and thrill-seeking yokels. Seldom seen with human eyes, the general public tends to doubt his very existence, and yet evidence thereof continues to circulate, most often in the form of grainy VHS footage of creatures that look oddly like humans wearing gorilla suits. Romulus cherishes his privacy, of course, and he goes the great lengths to preserve it. And yet, he often feels as if he is missing something, and many are the nights when he he finds himself longingly gazing at a group of hikers laughing around a campfire. The loneliness of the wilderness can weigh on a soul, even the sturdy soul of a North American Woodland Ape.

Challenges with technology:

• GPS can be unreliable in wilderness redoubts of the Pacific Northwest
• Fat, furry fingers
• Replacing lost iPhone charger without being seen is almost impossible

How we can help Romulus:

• Aid socialization without compromising his veil of privacy.
• Provide better knowledge of "off the beaten path" routes in order to ease the stress of travel.
• Make it easier to filter for ape-friendly options for B&Bs and restaurants.

Prior persona Metansiptah: Vengeful Mummy
Next persona Antone and Vladimir: Modern vampires
Cryptozoolists: Doug LeMoine and Martina Maleike.
Special thanks to Wordpress User Lake Placid Film Forum for the use of their image.

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Metansiptah.

Background:

Metansiptah was not a well-liked ruler. He was poisoned by his Chief of the Scented Oils during his morning ablutions with a paste of arsenic trioxide. The priest reciting his Book of the Dead prayers skipped several spells in order to trap Metansiptah's soul within his mummified remains. His tomb builder placed the correct curses against disturbance, but then left deliberate clues to the location of its entrance. For the past three thousand years, Metansiptah has been awakened from his unending twilight every few decades by the greedy and the foolhardy.

How we can help Metansiptah:

• Accommodate non-ASCII text types
• Use "magical" interaction metaphors to match his Middle Kingdom mental model
• Don't expect speed
• Utilize ubiquitous, location-aware technology to aid his hunt
• Metansiptah has plenty of time, so err on the side of information clarity rather than density

Next persona Romulus: North American Woodland Ape
Prior persona Sammy Bishop, AKA Destro: Gremlin
Egyptologist: Chris Noessel

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Sammy Bishop Destro.

Background:

Little Sammy Bishop was once just a normal boy. But once scratched by a gremlin, he became something else altogether. Destro roams the airports, construction sites, and back alleys of Detroit. Whenever possible, he joins forces with his friends to sabotage things like airplanes, semi-trucks, and heavy construction equipment.

Salient traits:

• Mischievous
• Self-involved
• Addicted to crushing
• An anarchist

How we can help Destro:

• Get him connected with others who are ready to annihilate huge mechanical systems.
• Give him access to lightweight, yet large tools that are optimized for damage.
• Provide contextual help that keep him hidden during his spontaneous, reckless missions of sabotage.

Prior persona Alexi Devers: Lycanthrope
Next persona Metansiptah: Vengeful Mummy
Paranoid airplane travelers: Susan Dybbs and Peter Duyan

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Alexi Devers.

Background:

While recently on a solo full-moon hike of the Samaria Gorge in Greece, Alexi thought he escaped a pack of wild dogs with only a few scratches. That next week he returned to Athens where he and his girlfriend Debbie are studying abroad. Three weeks later he's discovered they weren't dogs, he got more than scratches, and he has much more serious problems than his upcoming finals.

How we can help Alexi:

• Make calendar alerts find him wherever he is--and don't let him hit snooze.
• Outfit his smart phone with a snug-fitting strap that can handle a variety of shapes and kinds of movement, made of a material that can be easily cleaned.
• Provide map directions home that find an optimal path which avoids being seen.
• Connect him with like-minded others across the globe with easy access to ancient mystical texts and automatic language translation.

Prior persona Juan Espinoza: Class 5 Full-Roaming Vapor
Next persona Sammy Bishop, AKA Destro: Gremlin
Special thanks to Flickr User Cara Photography for the CC licensed use of this portrait.
Loup-garou-ionado: Chris Noessel

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Juan Espinoza.

Background:

Juan was a senior conductor for the Next Stage Railway in 1889, when a demonic cow on the track derailed the train, killing all aboard and decapitating him in the wreckage.

How we can help Juan:

• Use mechanical controls to match his 19th-century mental model and skill set.
• Make things accessible so they are easy to detect and operate without eyes, ears, or the ability to make physical contact with objects.
• Support multiple languages.

Next persona Alexi Devers: Lycanthrope
Spectral investigator: Chris Noessel

I remember studying the concept of the “reluctant hero” in college lit classes. This is the protagonist who is thrust into the role of being a savior or hero, often unequipped and unwilling to be The One. Think Bilbo Baggins, who just wanted to stay home in his hobbit hole rather than steal treasure from dragons, or Arthur Dent from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or even Han Solo. The reluctant hero typically needs some kind of supernatural intervention or magical object to get them to act.

As an interaction designer, I've found sometimes I need to design for the “reluctant user." This is someone who, given a choice, would rather not use the product I am designing-at all-no matter how cool the features, or how well-designed the experience. I've worked on products for disease management (“I can't wait to sit down and focus on my health condition!”), health insurance (“Sorry I can't go to the party, I'm too excited to check on my claim status!”), and—the mother of them all—filing taxes (“My dentist couldn’t fit me in for a root canal so I'm doing this instead“). In none of these cases do the users want to use the product and the related service. Yet there are consequences if they don't, so it’s incumbent on the designers to make the experience as painless as possible.

Case in point

We are helping a client assess one of their tax-related products. Measuring the effectiveness of these kinds of products is difficult. Where normally you are looking for high customer satisfaction rates, in this case, it’s really about minimizing pain, not making it a great experience they want to repeat anytime soon. Nobody wants to spend time preparing their taxes, they just want to it to be over so they can avoid penalties (and hopefully pay the least amount of tax possible). So if a user had a neutral experience, that’s actually a very positive result since we’re really starting from a baseline of ”I don’t want to do this.”

As with any project, key to success is identifying the users’ most important goals, but it's critical to keep those in the context of how much time they are willing to spend. After working with our tax software client and talking with teams who’ve worked on projects with reluctant users, we’ve gathered some things to keep in mind when designing for the reluctant user:

• If a user’s goal is to get it done as quickly as possible, make it so. Don't get cute with whizbang interactions that prolong the experience.
• Automate when possible (or at least provide options for automating). Users will likely be willing to trade some control for simplification.
• Use language that engages the user, and be careful to avoid jargon; users won’t be motivated to look up terms (for example, a user dealing with a health insurance claim dispute will want to see procedure names, not just billing and procedure codes).
• Set expectations about how long the process will take, and show (and celebrate) progress with feedback about completed tasks.
• Fill up “dead time” (such as waiting for steps in an installation process) with either useful information (such as tips or demonstrations…NOT advertisements), or provide a time estimate so the user can go do something else.
• Focus on and highlight any positive benefits that come out of having to endure the experience (such as that tax refund).

Quicken does a nice job with this last point, communicating how using TurboTax can help people get a bigger refund (free money is always a good angle to play). Another example is from home healthcare products that take every opportunity to reward the input of information and celebrate improvements in the numbers used to track health.

We’ve recently been hoping for a shot to redesign the DMV service experience, but are still in line waiting for our number to be called. While we are waiting, have any of you worked on products that target the reluctant user? What did you do?

Kia ora. In an earlier blog post, I asked if Kiwis would be interested in a January Cooper U, and despite it being in the “dead zone” of the summer holidays, the answer was an enthusiastic, “Yes!” So, we’re happy to open registration for a Kiwi Cooper U Practicum between 10-13 January.

Understanding how the brain works is important in interaction design not only to be able to craft experiences that support the way people think, but also to avoid common biases in our own brains as we make design decisions. One bias that sneaks into design problems all the time is called the “availability heuristic”, or the tendency to judge how important or common something is based on how easy it is for us to think of an example. For example, if you were to ask me how the baby boomers react to technology, the first example that jumps to my mind is my mother who happens to be a complete technophile and Apple fangrrl. Because of the ease with which that example comes to mind, I am at risk of grossly overestimating technical interest and ability amongst the baby boomer population.

If you’re involved in the design of products, you run into this problem all the time. Stakeholders use their own most easily-retrieved examples to compare against, whether it’s the CEO who is influenced by the pundit he read that morning, or the product manager who knows that one guy who is just like your target market, or the designer who is really designing for himself -- the self being the extreme “available example.”

Availability biases leads to poor design decisions because they are based on single, potentially skewed, examples; they also result in thrash because each individual involved in the design has his or her own reference example, making consensus difficult.

Effective research is only the first step toward avoiding this problem. Properly conducted ethnographic research will provide an understanding of the needs, goals, and behaviors of your target market, but it won’t solve the problem of availability bias on its own. It is too easy for designers and stakeholders to be influenced by, say, the most recent interview conducted, or the most memorable one.

Fortunately, we have a well-honed tool to elegantly overcome this problem: the persona. A well-crafted, research-based persona is an archetype that smooths out the idiosyncrasies of real individual people while retaining the patterns of needs and behaviors in the target market. At the same time, a persona retains enough human detail to feel like a real person. With practice and dedication, the persona becomes the first example that comes to mind. You still suffer from availability bias, but the bias is in favor of reality.

Incidentally, I got to thinking about the availability bias when Chris Noessel pointed me to this video on YouTube. Be forewarned: the tune is catchy and likely to cause a nasty case of earworm . Bradley Wray, FTW.

What tools do you use to overcome cognitive biases in your work?