Small Initiatives

The folks at User Interface Engineering have ramped up their "infomarketing" leading to the User Interface 12 conference coming in November.

I call it "infomarketing" because UIE provides moderately detailed interviews with each of the conference session leaders -- each well-known subject matter experts -- in the weeks preceding the event. The interviews themselves contain enough useful information to be both helpful alone and great teasers for the conference.

You can't say Jared Spool's gang doesn't understand how to make event marketing productive for the people being addressed by the message.

Case in point: this week's interview with Kim Goodwin of Cooper, in which she makes the case for Cooper's persona development and "goal-directed design" methodologies.

On personas:

"A persona is a behavioral model. The most effective behavioral models are distilled from interview and observation data of real users into an archetypal description of how a particular type of person behaves and what their goals are.

"The two essential components of a persona are the persona’s behaviors and goals. For any product or service, design teams have to create multiple personas that represent the range of likely behaviors and goals."

Defining goal-directed design:

"We call our methodology 'Goal-Directed' because it focuses on accomplishing goals. It's important to note that these are not only the persona's goals but also the business’s goals. If design teams only focus on the persona's goals to the exclusion of making profits, the product won't be successful."

Goodwin continues to explain the process in more detail. It's not cheap, but it's smart.

I was fortunate to attend Goodwin's sessions way back at User Interface 8. They shaped the way I still think today about personifying tasks and goals. And I still refer to all the session notebooks provided from that conference. So pile my recommendation atop the informative soft-sell from UIE and attend User Interface 12 if you can.

It's also not cheap, but it's smart.