ANTONELLA is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties.

She is also completely imaginary.

A New York Times article on how Ford used personas to create the Ford Fiesta: Before Creating the Car, Ford Designs the Driver.

Kim Goodwin from Cooper spoke at an IxDA event in New York about integrating visual design and interaction design. At Cooper, they feel pretty strongly that these should be treated as two distinct disciplines as they haven’t found anyone that can be really good at both. For those of you not familiar with Kim Goodwin, she is the author of my favorite book about building digital products Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services. If you are a product manager or anyone else actively involved in product development, buy this book and read it!

Be sure to read more about this presentation at: Cooper Journal: Video of Kim Goodwin speaking about how to integrate interaction, visual and industrial design at IxDA NYC

About the presentation:

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.

One of the greatest opportunities to improve a product or service lies in between what the user’s tasks are and what their goals are. If you can discover a discrepancy between how the user uses a product or service (the tasks they are performing) and what they really want to accomplish with it (their goal), this can really open up the potential to make innovative changes to your product or service. Many companies that rely solely on market research, as opposed to user research, routinely design their products and services to improve the efficiency of tasks but not necessarily helping the user to accomplish their goal.

A classic example of this is the first generation iPod. There were quite a few mp3 players on the market and some even had video and larger storage capacity. All of these let you click through your songs and play specific songs. The goal of the user, decidedly, being that they wanted to be able to play their mp3 music. But if you ever used one of those pre-iPod mp3 players, you might have remembered your thumb getting tired from all the clicking you had to do as each click painfully moved you one song at a time to the next song. And if you held down the button, it would be just as painful trying to stop remotely close to the song you wanted. When Apple brought the iPod to market, it had fewer features than most of the players already in the market. But what it did do was capitalize on the unmet goals of users who were tired of the one click navigation offered by all of the other players. It would seem that the users of the current mp3 players formulated some new goals based on the limitations of the products they were using. Oh and we shouldn’t forget iTunes, it also allowed users to easily sync their music without having to drag and drop files and folders. It seems so obvious in hind sight.

A lot of Interaction Designers are probably already familiar with this concept. In fact, Cooper has coined the term Goal-Directed® method and is a good place to learn more. Even if you aren’t an Interaction Designer, understanding what your customer’s goals are will help you deliver a much better product or service in the long run.