Activity Centred Design
Posted
September 30, 2008 
Comments(5)
Comments(5)
Joshua Porter has written a fairly lengthy post on Activity Centred Design. It’s likely to be fairly controversial I suspect.
Lately I’ve been arguing that the activity is a good frame for design. I started fleshing this out in my book, but admittedly it wasn’t as deep as I wanted to go. I believe that thinking about design from an activity-centric viewpoint is the most efficient way to get where you need to go…which is to create a piece of software that is valuable to people.
Thanks to Alun for the tip off :)
Nice one, I’m a *big fan* of ACD and share Larry Constantine’s view on it.
http://www.uie.com/articles/designing_web_applications_for_use/
It may be contentious to say so, but consequently I’m not a huge fan of personas as design tools for precisely the reasons outlined in the two articles. I’d much rather invest my time in modelling the activates a user performs than generate a archetype of behaviour.
Chris
While I’d agree that mapping activities are essential to understanding a customer – I think that we can’t throw personas out because they are awesome communication and ideation tools and if used properly can be used to build empathy for users across the business.
Activities and Personas are really two different levels of analysis, and if we focus on behavioural requirements for creating our personas (see our personas for CareerOne). We do actually get a tool for generating new ideas based around wider behavioural characteristics. The example I gave in my presentation illustrated that if we look at behaviour as part of the persona we can actually create a really powerful tool for communicating needs and generating ideas.
i.e. in this case our “needs based” persona, is a person who needs a range of different types of information which differs radically from that of a “career based” job seeker. These allow us to match the needs of people / embodied in personas to business goals and market segments and ultimately to ideas / features generated for the interface.
Hey Stephen,
I actually agree with you, at least in part. I find Personas a good means of communicating observed user behaviours and patterns to stakeholders, and this therefore facilitates buy in, and is actually really useful for editorial etc. I’ve also seen them used well, as you suggest, in the ideation phase. However, having personas is not really enough to make the ideation session worthwhile, they are simply one helpful element.
The ideation session needs to have several dimensions to really work well, only one of which is the user archetype, the others vary dependent on the project context but might typical be the activities and desired outcomes.
Combining these in random ways can lead to a fantastic idea generation phases, and I’m a big fan of doing this in combination with something like morphological analysis: http://syque.com/quality_tools/tools/Tools29.htm
So, that was a very round about way of saying I do see value in personas. Especially in the earlier conceptual phases, but as pure design tools I find them limited. I also find the ROI on them can be quite low, if you have limited time/budget other methods may be more useful.
But, we are quite lucky in NDM, that we often have the luxury of being able to create personas and use them as one weapon in our armoury without being wholly dependent on them
Chris
I was interested to read Steve Baty’s response…
[...] opposed to pure User Centred Design. There are a number of discussions around this subject on our USiT Blog at NDM IxD list . The prevailing opinion seems to be that pure UCD is a bit [...]