All that really matters is that you have empathy for your person. Personae foster empathy. Personae are:

• written in the person’s own voice
• personality
• motivations
• behaviors
• aspirations
• what keeps them up at night

We put things into the lab not just to see if the design functions when faced with a real person, but also to investigate expectations and opportunities.

There’s something we didn’t cover when talking about the “5 whys” that should be mentioned. One of the things that can happen when you do the “5 whys” technique (some people call it “7 whys”) is that you can get a leap to a very abstract level that doesn’t actually illuminate anything; the person you’re talking to takes your questioning as an intellectual challenge and makes a broad statement that encompasses the topic you’re talking about but is too vague to really get a handle on. Usually this statement would fail to communicate much of interest to a person not directly involved in the conversation, which is the clearest sign of its weakness. An analog of this is the vague job title or business description that doesn’t tell you what is actually done. “I’m an analog solutions provider.” The trick in these situations is to bring the discussion back down toward specifics by asking an investigatory question, such as “what makes that special,” “what makes that necessary,” “why do I want that,” “what would it be like to have this” — to bring the umbrella term back to something an individual person would experience. Sometimes you need a few “what” questions to drop down to a useful level again.

Happiness is increased when people give to charity or to people they know or create prosocial experiences: http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/seminars/2011/papers/norton.pdf and http://research.chicagobooth.edu/cdr/docs/spendingmoney-norton.pdf

Tricky design decisions should be supported by observation and experimentation.

Product evaluation (competitive or self)

Any time the product delights or disappoints you is worthy of a little write-up; pictures and video help.

• What is it
• Did it do what you expected it to do?
• Major pain and pleasure points
• Top opportunities or recommendations
• Apparent features
• Outer packaging
• Opening the box
• What is presented, in what order
• Does presentation reinforce brand or product story
• Informativeness of presentation
• Does presentation lead into setup

Getting it set up — physical

• Length of process
• Intelligibility of process/instructions
• Items falling to hand at the right time? Having to hunt for items?
• Missing or extra parts
• Anything cumbersome or difficult? Anything unexpectedly easy or pleasant?
• Is it clear what to do next?

Getting it set up — software

• Length of process
• Intelligibility of process/instructions
• Appropriateness of needed information/decisions during setup
• Is it clear what to do next?

First use

• Device behavior on first power
• Time to first value
• Any poorly-explained or seemingly needless operations?
• Other operations required to get the system working (especially)

Day-to-day use

• Easy to get started?
• Time to startup
• Any repeated operations necessary?
• Appropriateness of feedback during startup
• Appropriateness of feedback to user action
• Other pain or pleasure points

Troubleshooting

• What went wrong? How did you know? What did you do? Did it work?

Support

• Did you use support? Why? What was that experience like?

Wrap-up

• Apparent value proposition
• Top five great things about the product
• Top five things wrong with the product
• “If only it would…” and other experience gaps, improvement opportunities
• Recommendations

1. Insights
2. Opportunities
3. Problems/needs/wishes people have that we could solve
4. Potential solutions