The myth of the noble user
Apr 11th, 2008 by Aaron Louie
Every time I venture into the wide world beyond my daily haunts, I encounter people that, to put it bluntly, annoy the hell out of me. You know them: the “other” people, the ones who litter, talk on their cellphones while driving, drive atmosphere-polluting behemoths, snore loudly in airplanes on red-eye flights, actually enjoy watching TV commercials, click on the animated monkey in banner ads, listen to smooth jazz, etc, etc.
Yesterday, it struck me that the users I design user interfaces for might just be those same people. This led me to realize that we in the user-centered design industry often tend to idealize our users, creating soft-focus glamorized personas that portray them as honest, hard-working, likeable people. I wonder, though… do we do the world a disservice by glossing over their flaws?
What would happen if we tried to understand our users as real human beings, warts and all? How would our design process change for people who are dishonest, lazy, disagreeable, and - heaven forbid - evil?
As user-centered professionals, it’s our job to promote and defend the needs of all users, right?
No, not really. It’s our job to design experiences that simultaneously accomplish the goals of our employer or client while meeting users’ needs as best we can. All user needs we meet must be within the subset that are correlated - directly or indirectly - with the business’ or organization’s needs.
In social networking sites and multiplayer online games, it becomes more crucial to understand the personality flaws of users. Every online community suffers from trolls and griefers who intentionally abuse other users and poison social systems with offending or annoying content or actions. They do this to gain attention, feel a sense of empowerment, get revenge on another user, or just entertain themselves. However, even “normal” users will game social systems to maximize their virtual wealth, improve their peer rating, gain attention, feel a sense of empowerment, etc. The design of any good online community will have checks and balances to prevent users from exploiting the system or abusing each other.
So what does this mean for the user-centered designer? I think it means that maybe we should drink our persona kool-aid with a grain of salt. Just as pharmacists include a list of side effects and contraindications for every drug they recommend, perhaps we should be detailing the weaknesses, negative traits, and potential errant behaviors of our personas. Or maybe we should create anti-personas for the trolls, griefers, or any other user we’d like to actively discourage.
What would follow from this would be designs that proactively inhibit or balance out negative behaviors. We would specify who we are designing against in addition to who we are designing for, thereby improving the focus on our true target audiences. We’d discover which audiences are supporting the bottom line of our clients. We’d create online communities that are self-regulating. Or maybe we’d just understand who our users really are: imperfect human beings with foibles and vices. Just like you and me.