WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:34.280
Why personas? Why do we introduce these fairly unusual features into our design process?
And the answer is, we don't naturally do user-centered design. If you are in user experience design or
user-centered design, that may sound a little unusual to you, but still, the vast majority
of systems do not really focus on users in the way that we need them to.
Personas are a way to get that focus, and they really are very much about focus.

00:00:34.280 --> 00:01:03.440
And some of the anomalies in the descriptions of personas over really the past 20 or more years,
since they were introduced, have kind of muddied that water.
They've led us away from, the true point.
We're going to be talking about the problems that we have with, low awareness of users.
I teach software engineering courses, and they are just now starting to have a little content about

00:01:03.440 --> 00:01:32.120
usability, but still, nothing about user research and how you decide how to design a system in
terms of making it suitable for its intended audience. So, there really isn't any understanding
of who the users are, what they need, and how they work. We still do see a lot of references to roles.
Roles in organizations are fantastically problematic because often the people who are in

00:01:32.120 --> 00:02:02.760
those roles don't even understand them fully, yet we're using them in software development
to try to describe the needs of a user. I'm afraid it's a little bit nonsensical.
And in a lot of cases, we have a very strong technology focus.
This can be within a team or within an entire organization.
If you're working within an engineering organization, for example,
the idea that the engineers should be going out and talking to others to decide what they should

00:02:02.760 --> 00:02:22.600
build is moderately unusual in many instances. So, that is a pretty big issue in terms of,
the absence of users and the avoidance, almost by definition, of user-centered
design. If you don't know anything about the users, you cannot do user-centered design.