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Business, Design, User Experience, Software, User research
Business, Design, User Experience, Software, User research Thursday
08Nov
Thursday, November 8 37Signals Jumps the Shark
I used to like 37Signals and their blog, but recently it has turned into what they’ve often decried in the past: a PR soapbox. Half the posts it seems are about their own products, how great they are, how the 37Signals team uses their own products, how the products got designed, and how 37Signals is taking it to The Man. In fact, 14 of the last 23 posts to the SVN blog fall into this realm by my count. Certainly some of it is interesting behind-the-scenes and tips/tricks stuff, but the density of it gets wearing.
Some of the recent posts have been breezy treatments on complicated topics like “How has open-source helped or hindered?” (answer: it’s all good!) and “Can I build a product business if I’m just a designer?” (answer: here’s a few anecdotes from my personal experience that are unique and have nothing to do with you. You go girl!)
The post that got my ire up just now was one about personas. Essentially Jason says, “Personas are crap. Don’t bother with them. We don’t use them, neither should you. We design for ourselves and our needs, because lots of other people have our needs, and that’s how you should design too.”
Here’s how Jason starts the post:
We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.
Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems. We recognize our problems aren’t unique. In fact, our problems are probably a lot like your problems. So we bundle up the solutions to our problems in the form of web-based software and offer them for sale.
Ah, if only life were that easy all the time. What if you have to design a dental chair, and you’ve never done dentistry? You could look at it from the standpoint of the patient, since you’ve been in that position, but you don’t really know what goes on in the mind of a dentist or the dental assistant, who are the two other users of the chair (and quite different in what they want and need from dental equipment, by the way).
Now I’m not the world’s biggest fan of personas, but this often comes down to execution rather than the tool itself. Personas are often done poorly or used in ways they shouldn’t be. They are not always the most effective means of conveying user needs and perceptions. But they have their place and if done well can be useful. And the basic goal of a persona is valuable: help the design team think about the various people they are designing for who are not like the designers themselves. They are less useful and defensible when made up entirely rather than synthesized out of in-person user research, and Jason seems to assume that all personas are made up.
Jason says:
We recognize not everyone shares our problems, our point of view, or our opinions, but that verdict’s the same if you use personas. Making decisions based on real opinions trumps making decisions based on imaginary opinions.
Exactly. Personas can (and should if possible) be based on real opinions too, they don’t have to be fabricated. With any type of deep qualitative user research, whether conducted on yourself or others, requires a level of abstraction and extrapolation in order to be effective (which is why qual and quant must be compelentary). Personas are no different, they just make the extrapolation more explicit.
The whole point of personas is to avoid the problem of designers (or engineers, or marketers, or whomever) thinking that their problems are the same as their customers’ problems, and that their customers think the way they do. This is a proven path to failure for many products. Blithely assuming that everyone else designs products for people like themselves, a la 37Signals or Jake Burton, smacks of arrogance and/or narrow-mindedness.
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Reader Comments (7)
I heard Jason speak at SXSW a couple of year ago where he shot down wireframes. I'm all for streamlining process and getting to solutions quickly but what's next on his hitlist? Its all well and good for them to design tools that they're using and call personas bullshit but your example of dental chair design above is apt. What silliness.
Thank God someone else noticed this.
For me, it's less about their narrow mindedness, but the fact that they keep interviewing themselves. It's one thing to have an opinion and share it on your blog, but to constantly frame it like "People keep asking us..." it makes it seem like they are so deluged with fans and questions that to make it easy for us all, they'll just sum it up for us.
Again, blogging is fine. Posing controversial and new ideas to engage the community in discussion is great. But blogging while building a bronze statue of yourself is too much.
Fried does not say or imply "neither should you" use personas. In fact, I think they were pretty careful to avoid that in the post.
They've also been fairly careful to consistently say: we believe we're successful because we create products that solve our own problems, but that isn't the way to approach all product design. In fact when I've seen Fried speak, he'll often say this several times in one presentation.
Clearly the way a tiny boutique software company works isn't how a giant design company with corporate clients (like Frog) can work, nor how a large software company like, sav, Adobe or Amazon could work. 37S's approach resonates really well with a particular audience of other small (or wannabe-small) software developers.
I wrote a similar post about 18 months ago, using the same phrase.
By the way, I'll be taking personas to task in interactions magazine, article to appear Jan 2008.
Actually, the posts you reference are part of their "Ask 37signals" series where they answer people's questions. People send questions and they post answers. They aren't interviewing themselves.
37signals has consistently said the same thing: "These are our opinions and this is what works for us. Your mileage may vary. There are many ways of doing something, we're just here to share our way."
It's right at the front of the book, in fact.
@Andrew: Hmm, I don't see any such qualifiers in the article. It's pretty emphatic that personas don't work for them, and they don't think they work in general for anyone else. Jason puts forward a one-sided definition of personas, by implication makes it sound like that is the entirety of the world of personas, and then shoots holes in it without acknowledging that there are other ways of approaching personas that address the shortcomings that he sets up.
"Hmm, I don't see any such qualifiers in the article."
No, but neither do they actually write the words "neither should you" which you actually place inside paraphrased quotation in your post.