Thinkpieces

“People’s interactions with products can be better supported by thinking more holistically about their activities and processes rather than focusing on designing the thing as an isolated object ”

– Jane Fulton Suri

We talk about interactions and experience that people have with products and services. The question is often asked how do you show what an interaction or an experience looks like? There are many ways to answer this question and one of the most powerful techniques we use is persona development and user pathway modelling.

Personas

In the product and service design process we are keen to understand who is experiencing the benefits of the product or service. To explore this who we think about taking the experience to the level of everyday people like you and me. We want to generate deep human empathy and understanding so we develop personas. Ideally we draw from real world people and create profiles of people based on real world characteristics. These characteristics may be basic demographic details such as a person’s age, where they live, what they do, their cultural background and other important characteristics that may help us understand their needs and experiences with the product or service we are designing. This includes such characteristics as the extent of their technology saviness, what sort of skills they have or the preferences they may have.

For example, we developed a series of Practice Manager personas to help break up the homogenous organisational thinking about the world of medical practice, i.e., organisational members viewed the key users as General Medical Practitioners (GPs) and did not think about the other key people in a medical practice. The personas we developed zoomed in on the practice management user group. The characteristics we looked at included basic demographic details as well as their career into the medical profession, the scope of their day-to-day work and their technology saviness. This resulted in a variety of personas that illustrated very different types of needs and desires.

Pathways

“We shift our perspective from the massive totality of the system to the pathways of individual human experience” Richard Buchanan, “Interaction Pathways in Organizational Life,” in Managing as Designing, ed. Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, 54-64. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

The experience of an individual, or as described above a persona, can be mapped in ways to show the touch-points or the products and services they interact with to achieve a certain goal. That goal may be to pass through school with straight A’s, or to run a successful business, or to buy and sell property for a profit or to get the right medical advice to improve quality of their life. Clarifying the goal helps contextualise the design of distinct products or services. It helps designers reduce the noise of complexity and allows a human perspective to be held long enough to see what we might be able to do to make that experience dignified and valued. The idea of creating a pathway is both an analytical and creative process. It requires a deep understanding of users’ experiences, which can be based on interviews, observing people, shadowing people in their day-to-day activities and so on. Then, we can express this data as a visual model that allows closer investigation and exploration about that experience – as it happens to today, as we think it may happen in the future or as we think it should happen. This expression is all taken from the user’s perspective.

The pathway technique is an interesting, engaging, creative and expressive way to tackle business problems. Most business problems are complex, have many dimensions, and are not easily solvable. If we take a human approach and consider a person’s experience through this complexity, we can develop a pathway and then we can start to make real, practical and meaningful changes to that system.

A user pathway allows us to look at the whole system from the user’s point of view. The pathway map itself is simply a visual way of getting our heads around the complexity. Making sense of a complex system is sometimes easier when looked at from the user’s perspective. We can look at the combination of products and services that make up the system and the user’s experience through that system.

Constructing a user pathway forces an organisation to take an outside in view, rather than an inside out view. Whilst this sounds like a simple and logical concept, it is much more difficult in practice. It is much easier to think from the perspective of our own organisational structures, business processes and technologies. A well-constructed user pathway allows us to develop empathy and a real understanding of the user’s experience in an organisational system. If we can get into the user’s space and think about the product or service from their perspective, we are more likely to design and make things which the user finds useful, useable and desirable. User pathways are helpful tools for dealing with complexity and facilitate dialogue with end users. They also make sense of respective roles in implementation as the intent is delivered.

User pathways are used both to understand the current experiences and to identify points of opportunity to improve the user experience. The pathway map can help navigate the organisation to both the touch-points that can be changed and the back-end layers of organisational design such as business process, people and structures, technology and systems.

This sample pathway was developed for a project, which designed a complex government system that involved all Australians registering their personal and health-related information. The pathway visual captures general steps, which all ‘users’ would experience. It focuses not just on what they have to do as part of registering, but how they felt and the sorts of questions they might be asking throughout the process. As part of the design process, we also asked ourselves what is needed to deliver on this experience.

The creation and use of personas and pathways brings a human dimension into organsational deliberations about tackling complex problems, designing change and improving user expeirence products and services. It has been our experience that the development of personas and pathways engages managers and decision makers in understanding the real impacts of their decisions in the lives of the public they serve.