The Forgotten User

by John Schrag

 

I’ve really enjoyed hearing all the new ideas being tossed around here at the Usability Professional's Association Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. My colleague Desirée Sy and I had presented a tutorial on the topic of making your UX practice Agile, so I was on the lookout for more Agile/UX materials. With this in mind, I went to see a poster presentation by Jon Innes of UX Innovations and fellow Autodesker James McElroy , called “The UXI Matrix”.

Jon and James presented a method of charting and making visible the state of an Agile project in terms of its usability, to help a team monitor and control its UX work. The chart had many features, but I was particularly interested to see how they charted the stories in the backlog against all the different user personas. A series of checkboxes showed which features were related to which personas. The chart also showed a tally of how many actual human beings representing each persona type had been talked to by the team. This mapping had some interesting effects; it suggested when personas might need to be merged (when they share all the same stories), and warned when potential error loomed (when a given persona was under represented in actual human contact). And it showed when the needs of some personas were being ignored by the project --- none of their stories were getting done.

This ‘forgotten user’ idea struck home later that day when I was using the hotel bathroom on the conference floor, and found a smartphone that some poor fellow had left behind. There was no one else in the bathroom, so I poked around on the phone to see if there was some way to determine who owned it, and to get a message back to him. I had no luck; the phone was very securely locked up, protecting the owner's private data – but also preventing the phone from being returned.

I realized that I was a forgotten persona --- the "honest guy who finds a lost phone". I represented a rare but critical persona, with a single workflow. The phone designers had focused instead on thwarting another valid persona: the phone/identity thief. I imagined a feature on the phone that would allow me leave a voice mail for the owner (that would be emailed to him, or that he could pick up from his phone service provider) so I could let him know that I was leaving his phone with the hotel concierge. 

Some smartphones (such as the iPhone) have a feature to help the owner track it down, and even to display a message to whoever might have found it. But these features are designed for the phone owner, not the honest finder.

So ask yourself: in your designs, do you consider the people who interact rarely but critically with your designs? It's something to think about.

Comments

[Jon]

Hey John,

I had to share this with you. Turns out the iOS team has prioritized our feature idea. See the description of Find My Phone: Lost Mode coming soon in iOS6.

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios6/

It shows that Apple values customer loyalty over short term profits in my mind. I'm not sure of the data used in this decision, but it's one I'd support in principle.

Perhaps this was already in the works? I also remember seeing a description of AirPlay on a design blog long before it was released.

Hope all is well at Autodesk.

[Innes_jon]

John,

Glad you liked the poster. I recently left an iPhone at the CHI conference and wished the designers had thought of the very feature you mention. However, in the UXI matrix, I should point out that business impact is considered for each story/use case.

In the case of the lost phone, it might be to Apple's advantage that I lost my 3GS. Had they used the UXI Matrix, the story you mention might not have made the cut--just like copy & paste didn't make it into iOSv1. As I tell all my clients, good design is the delicate art of considering the needs of users, the business, and technology constraints (in that order).

On my old blackberry, I customized the screen that showed when locked to display "call xxx-xxx-xxxx for reward if found." Unfortunately, I didn't do his on my iPhone--and it was the first cell I ever misplaced in 13 years.

The good news is I was looking for an excuse to upgrade to an iPhone 4 :)

Jon
www.uxinnovation.com