Download The Simplicity Shift

P1: GFM/FEO
P2: GFM/GJN
QC: FEN/GFM
CB487-05
Jenson
October 20, 2003
17:32
T1: .
Char Count= 0
User Blindness
55
product. This usually uncovers significant opportunities and trouble
spots early in the product process.
I like to think of these insights as the “Homework” insights. They
help to research and understand the product space. They won’t give you
a design, but they do soften you up, opening new ways of thinking
about the product and uncovering big problems you hadn’t seen before.
In addition, these homework assignments produce tangible results
that can be shared with the entire team, including management. You
can imagine questions like “Have you verified your Personas with marketing?” or “Has that Scenario uncovered an architecture risk?” These
two insights break the mystery of the design process and start sharing
it with the entire company.
Finally, these insights are fairly fast and inexpensive. A company of
any size should be able to pull this off in a few weeks and this is time
that can save you trouble down the line.
Once a company is capable of using these simple and fast tools, it can
them move up to the more in-depth methods of understanding users,
such as ethnographic studies, focus groups, and field studies. These are
all effective tools. Recommended books are in the Appendix at the back
of the book. These tools are most effective, though, after you have the
basic tools in place. You must start working on the communication and
agreement of Personas and Scenarios before you can absorb and use the
information you find from these deeper tools.