Design modeling canvas: what is
This text describes in detail the What is spot of the Design modeling canvas.
This article is a part of the series that describes the Design modeling canvas. I’ll be sharing subsequent articles in the upcoming months. Here’s the entire table of contents of the series:
- Methodological background,
- Present context & Future context,
- What is,
- Model of what is,
- Model of what could be,
- Strategy.
Who? When? Where? What?
This block is aimed at researching and gathering data about people who is supposed to be using the product/service, their context of use as well as goals and needs. For this sake, it’s imperative for a designer to immerse oneself into reality — observe and talk to real people. The key here is to add as many details as possible attempting to “celebrate the unique and peculiar” (Kolko) instead of generalization. This shift from high context to low context yields new — individual — dimension to overall picture.
Customers & users segments
To describe Customers & Users Segments one should learn Who are those people I’m designing for? After defining segments with stakeholders, it’s essential to step away from generalisation and abstract labels, and proceed with personification. “Concepts as “user”, “designed for the user” and “user-friendly” are too vague and therefore not practical to use as design models or definitions for the communication in the development team. With a blurred concept of “the user” there is easy to design for almost every possible feature. The result is often a bad compromise burdened with usability problems. Cooper labels this phenomena as ‘the elastic user’.” (Blomkvist)
It’s essential to capture as many specific details and features of each segment as possible to further process them and then use them for creating personas. “A description of a human being should include physiognomic dimensions as well as sociological and psychological dimensions. Each of these has an impact on the character’s behaviours and actions. The descriptions of physiognomy, sociology, and psychology enable an understanding of the motivation behind the persona’s actions in the scenarios. The dimensions encompass both past and present, both the self and relations to others.” (Nielsen)
That general question I started with can be split into a number of more specific ones to cover the following aspects:
- name: persona is a symbolic representation of a real person, and real people are supposed have names (as well as certain age),
- demographics: Where are the customers & users geographically? How old are they? What’s their economic situation?
- personal goals and motivations: What do people want? What do people care about? What convinces them?
- problems and pain points: What events and situations do people experience in their lives that they try to resolve? What frustrates them? What’s stopping them?
- behaviour or what people do: How do people normally act while achieving their goals? What information do they consider crucial to make a decision?
- attitudes or what people think: How do people perceive the situation? How do they feel about their tasks?
- limitations: What limitations do they have (e.g. physical, cultural, social, etc)?
- interpersonal wishes: What’s their desired relationship with others? What desired image of themselves do they want to create?
- professional ambitions: What are their short-term and long-term professional goals?
- background and experience level in the area: What is their prior experience? What background knowledge do they have? What do they need to know to be able to use this product/service?
There could be cases when it’s important to take into account a misuse of a product/service that can lead to dangerous consequences in terms of safety or security. In this case antipersonas come into play. “An antipersona is a representation of a user group that could misuse a product in ways that negatively impact target users and the business.” (Ramaswami) Approach-wise, antipersonas can be dealt with in the same fashion as personas.
What’s the use of this segmentation? Having Customers & Users segments at hand and understanding value they bring to business success, it is possible to prioritise one over another. The essential thing here is that a product/service can’t satisfy each segment’s needs perfectly, however it should not completely ruin the experience of anyone from less prioritised segments (consider the example with a TV series.) When it comes to personas, it’s important to keep in mind the following suggestion. “Depending how much different personas should influence the design, they are given different status: primary, secondary, supplemental, served and negative. Every cast of characters has at least one primary persona, the individual who is the main focus of the design. To be a primary, a persona is someone who must be satisfied, but cannot be satisfied with a user interface designed for any other persona. Cooper argues that every primary requires a separate and unique user interface.” (Blomkvist)
It might be useful to visualize personas in the form of Empathy Maps that help to communicate knowledge about users and foster a shared understanding among everyone involved. In this case, empathy maps can help in revealing and comparing trends and patterns of behavior across different user segments. Or, the other way around, empathy mapping could be used prior to the creation of personas as a tool to collect and organize user research data. Aggregated empathy maps combine multiple individual empathy maps from users who demonstrate similar patterns of behavior and can be grouped into one segment. This way, aggregated empathy maps reveal specific themes inherent to a particular user group and can precede the creation of personas. In any case, the ultimate goal of empathy mapping is to develop empathy towards people.
Besides traditional empathy map format, there’s an updated version by Dave Gray which I find thorough and useful framework.
As for the application of the tool, the sequence of activities is suggested by the numbered sections on the Empathy Map. The idea is to start with the Goal section by identifying Who is supposed to be the subject of the map as well as what they need to Do which should be described in terms of abservable behaviour. Once the background is established, it makes it possible to specify observations and populate with more details the following sections of the map: Seeing, Saying, Doing, and Hearing. This helps to recognise what other people’s experiences looks like. Now that observable or outside elements are grasped you may want to shift towards central spot of the canvas and elaborate on what is happening inside — Thinking and Feeling. The latter is the most important section of the map, “the primary power of the exercise” which allows to conceive what it is like “to be inside someone else’s head”.
Thanks for reading! I’ll be sharing subsequent articles of the series in the upcoming months and would appreciate any feedback, comments, and critique.
Feel free to reach out via LinkedIn.
