Alan Cooper

to minimize mouse movement

Don’t make the user feel stupid

The OXO Good Grips line of products was originally designed to be easy to use for people with arthritis. It turns out that satisfying this user with the most constraints (and a tiny portion of the total market) satisfies the bulk of customers greatly.

If you are involved with a product team, design team, or client who claims to be using personas, ask them how their personas were constructed, what user data was gathered, and how it was analyzed to create them

This process has four major activities:

Developing stories or scenarios as a means of imagining ideal user interactions
Using those scenarios to extract designrequirements
Using these requirements in turn to define the product’s fundamental interaction framework
Filling in that framework with ever-increasing amounts of design detail

using personas to create stories that point to user satisfaction.

Imagining a story about a person using our product leverages our creativity to a greater power than when we just imagine a better form factor or configuration of screen elements

Brenda Laurel explored the concept of structuring interaction around dramatic principles in her book Computers as Theatre, in which she urges us to “…focus on designing the action.

Interaction design narratives are quite similar to the comic-book-like sequences called storyboards that are used in the motion picture industry.

Scenarios are paradoxically concrete but rough, tangible but flexible … they implicitly encourage “what-if?” thinking among all parties.