 So as you mentioned, I'm Dave Borshensky. I've been working in the user experience arena for about 17 years now. It's kind of interesting how our goats can come back and haunt us. I was just hanging around the sessions yesterday, and all of a sudden I recognized a face from Philadelphia, which I was like, wait a minute, what? So when I first started in user experience, I was with a project management company called Primavera Systems. And there's Kurt right there. So do you go by Kurt now, or Kurt is? Kurt, Kurt. He can tell you how and when I started in it. He's probably, you know, he can pull out all the scary stories for you if anybody wants to hear those. I have, I am currently working as the manager of product usability and design at Bergen Group. They're an analyst firm, much like Gartner and Forrester. I'm also the founder of Usable Patterns. We're just a consulting group that really tries to help local companies work on 132 applications, web-based applications, and anything we can do to help people get product to market, capture requirements. We try and do just about a little bit of everything. So as a user experience person, I think that oftentimes people wonder, well, why, how can user experience fit in Agile? Why, why include user experience in Agile? And a lot of the times, you know, we get lumped into that big upfront design portion of development. And I'm here to tell you that that's really not where user experience belongs. Just, you know, I'm sure everybody here is very familiar with Manifesto. Two of the items in there are very near and dear to my heart in that we value individuals interactions over processes and tools. And we prefer customer collaboration over contract negotiation. I think that those two things that, if you talk to anybody that is really a user advocate, which is really how I feel whenever I'm working, those will always be very close to their heart. So why are we here? I can't speak for everyone, obviously. The reason that I'm here today is because I want to make sure the software that I'm helping deliver is making an impact for my clients and their users. You know, I sometimes work in a weird situation where my clients are not the end user of the product I'm developing. And so I have to kind of balance a couple different levels of requirements. But ultimately, I want to make sure that the people using the software are using it and feeling good about it and getting what they want done. I want them to have a positive experience. And to use the software to accomplish those goals. I want them to buy more software and services because the more software and services they buy, the more money I'm going to end up making in the long run. And you know, I'm not all about making money. But I do believe that the agile manifesto can help me do all of these things because ultimately, I want to have a life away from developing software. And as we think about that, I think all of us would realize that that's what we work for. So how many of you have ever heard the term persona? OK, quite a few of you. How many of you have ever worked for a company that has tried using persona? OK, not quite as many. How many of you that worked for those companies thought the personas that came up for discussion were kind of ridiculous? You didn't help develop those, right, Alan? They're ones you probably came on and was like, oh, no, we've got to do something about this. Yeah. How many of you believe that persona do smack of upfront design? OK, couple of you. I'm going to give some answers to these questions. I don't know that I'm going to necessarily convert you to my way of thinking. But hopefully I can give you a tool that you'll be able to take back and help you interact with your customers in a better way. So what is a persona? Personas are a customer profile that puts a face on what is known about your client. There really is a way to kind of encapsulate the data. And unfortunately, when we're talking about data, that's a little bit difficult to portray the data just as data. Spreadsheets don't tell a user story. That's why your story cards are not all done in Excel most of the time. It's an archetype created to represent a particular class of real users. Not people that you would like to sell the software to, but people that you are selling the software to. There are times when you will want to look at the type of people that you would like to sell the software to. But right now, we're going to concentrate just on the people that we are selling to. It resembles several people who were interviewed, but never matches one of them exactly. And most importantly, it's important to remember that this is just a tool. I was having this discussion with Alan Cooper yesterday. It is just a tool. It is used to help us understand what the customer motivation is for what they're trying to do. It is a tool to help us keep the client user goal in mind while developing your product. So just really quick, who wants to volunteer what one of their customer goals are? So let's see if we can identify one of those real quick. Anybody want to volunteer? Right there. I'm one of those individual contributors. And his goal is, give me my work and get out of my way. And so the concept is, don't make the application be so hard to use or make me work with it so much that I'm actually wasting time trying to get this stuff to work while trying to do everything else. Right. Give me my work and get out of my way. That's an excellent example of a goal. I was more more domain specific. But for the end of the time system, I want to be able to reconcile what we're really, you know, revenue against, you know, stand at court revenue with that, you know, the data revenue. OK. Why? OK. And otherwise, my clients are a part of it. Right. OK. And that's an excellent goal, right? I want to be able to maintain the accounting data correctly so that I don't get fired and so that my customers buy more software. Is that? There's a part of it that I'm going to come to. Right. How many of you have an iPhone here? I know there's a couple. OK. Who wants to go and wonder why they bought the iPhone? Go ahead. So I can sync my calendar. So I can sync my calendar. Why? Why do you want to sync your calendar? I was on time, basically. So did you show up and came down time? Well, I didn't want to show up and came down time. Because it's embarrassing when I'm on this meeting. OK. It's embarrassing. So do you understand how I'm trying to push it a little bit further? It's not just I want to use the software to accomplish this. It's really, I have an underlying goal that I want to be able to get to. OK. So it isn't their goal to use my software to do X. It is my goal, even if a product is the coolest device ever, right? Because I'm picking up the Palm Pre today after the conference. And everybody's going to get one of those now. Just drop your iPhones, right? Right. Am I hearing crickets? So productivity software. Clients want to get their work done and go home, right? They don't care that they can make beautiful fonts. I mean, yeah, they will, because there's a part of the user experience that says, I want to have joy while I'm doing my job. But mostly, I just want to get my job done and go home. Gaming systems. I want to be able to sit down in front of a couch and turn into a vegetable for a couple of hours and not have to worry about the rest of the world. I want to be entertained. I want to have fun. Smartphones. Clients are looking to work away from the office. They have some desire that they want to not be tied down to that desk eight hours a day or 10 hours a day or heaven forbid, 15 hours a day. They want to be able to entertain themselves. They want to be able to look fashionable. I'm sure that nobody in this room bought the iPhone because they wanted to look fashionable. But I do know of some people. OK, we do have one person. And I notice you also have a MacBook. Oh, and Jeff, Jeff, please hold up your MacBook. Jeff also buys the skins for his MacBook so it can be extremely fashionable. But the goal is not to use your software, right? The fact of the matter is is you can get multiple pieces of software to do the same thing. The Palm Pre will do many of the things the iPhone will do. The Blackberry will do many of the things the iPhone will do. But ultimately, it's so that the user can enjoy doing what they're doing and get it done and not have to worry about it. So how do we make a real persona? Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to talk to people. And so this is where I tie it back to the manifesto, right? We value individuals and their actions over processes and tools. It really ultimately may not matter to your end user what platform you write the software in. It may because if you write it for the Mac platform, you're writing for a smaller audience. On the other hand, you may be writing it for a more well-informed audience or an audience that is expecting a different level of interaction. But ultimately, it's about the individual being able to accomplish what they want to accomplish. And customer collaboration, that means you actually have to talk to your customers. You have to sit down with them. You have to walk them out on their shoes and understand what they're trying to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. So, interacting with your clients and users. How many of you feel that you're doing that now? Wow, I really hope that we'd have more hands here because that really seems to be one of the things that agile really is important for. The ability to sit down with your customers is one of the most valuable resources you're gonna have. And the interactions that you're gonna have with them are gonna change the way you look at developing that software. Visit them where they work. Why would I say that? Why would I say go visit them where they work? Jeff will tell you it's because I got trained by Hugh Byron, Catherine Holtz-Blaton and I believe in contextual inquiry, but there's other reasons too. I think it's because in any other situation, it's a contrived situation. If you're there at their desk just watching them play around, you see the flow charts that are on their wall. You see the gizmos that they have everywhere. You see how they stack their work. You see the flow of information as they move papers around and you're able to just look at what they're really doing and you can see patterns. If one person doesn't want it's a coincidence, but if you see two or three people doing similar work around through shortcuts that they've actually found within your system, then you're starting to see more of a pattern of execution than maybe you're missing one. Right, over here. Amethyst. Amethyst, okay. Amethyst. If I'm sitting there in the environment where they're at and I understand that they're sitting in a pretty harsh environment where it's pretty noisy, maybe they're not having an easy time being able to concentrate on their screen because there's so much noise because they're in a cube farm now. I'm gonna have a lot of empathy for them as they're using my product, okay. I'm also gonna catch things that I would not have caught. That was the point that you were trying to make. There's a lot of times when I sit down with a customer and I'll ask them, so what do you do all day? Well, they'll hit the high points, right? They'll hit the high points and they'll say, well, you know, I come in, I check my email, and I look to see if there's any hot items in my email that I need to take care of, and then after I go for my email, I look at the stack of stuff on my desk that I need to work that I've been pushing off for X amount of days, and then I'll dive into work. In the meantime, one of the companies I used to work for did systems management software, and so that was the story that we got from one of those individuals, and he would sit down, steaming hot cup of coffee, really excited about looking forward to today's work, and before he even got to a second email, he was responding to a call taking him away from his desk and his cup of coffee that he'd just gotten that he had hoped to be able to drink while reading his emails, okay, so that was one time. And then we went to the next company, and the steaming cup of coffee was nearly exactly the same. They come in, I don't know what it is about system engineers or network engineers, they always need to have that cup of coffee in the morning to get them going. I don't know, I'm kind of the same, anyone else kind of like that, yeah. So you start realizing that there's a pattern, as was mentioned, and you start realizing that, wow, they really never have a chance to finish their coffee, they never really have a chance to have a continuous time in front of their screen where they're gonna be using our software, and so maybe we better make sure there's no timeouts, and that information would never have been found by interviews, unless they're telling you, and this is the other problem with doing user analysis just by interviews, well, you know what, your software always times out whenever I use it, or you know what, I hate your software, all it does is blow up every third time I use it. When you're doing a user interview, and they're not right there at their desk, they're gonna tell you their pain points, they're not gonna tell you all the other things that are working well for them, they are gonna tell you their pain points and make you focus on those, and that's one of the things that you kind of brought up, right? It's one of those situations where all of a sudden you're focusing on the leg of the elephant as opposed to the trunk. So ultimately what we want you to do is we want you to learn what they do and why they do it. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Again, identify what they're really trying to accomplish and how they're trying to accomplish it. Ask them what it seems over their tears. Sit down, have a conversation with them. Buy them that coffee in the morning and sit down and talk to them and then tag along with them as they're walking around trying to put out the fires of the day. Ask them what they already like about the product. A lot of the times when you're talking to customers they will focus only on the problems that they have. Is there an experience that you really like? Jeff, tell me about the iPhone. What is it that you like best about the iPhone? Didn't have anything like it before so I like best feeling connected with everybody else through Twitter and email and other things. Now I can, now I can, you know, doze off and pay attention to other people or other people that pay attention to you. That's, it's okay, I won't take that personally, Jeff. I know you could actually give this presentation in your sleep. But the fact of the matter is, is there are things that we don't understand sometimes. If I was trying to develop a product that competes with the iPhone and all I listened to is what Jeff just said, I could do something like that, right? I can actually do everything Jeff said on my Palm Trio. But the one thing that Palm Trio is not, sexy, it's not sexy, it's not fun, it's not exciting to play with. It's very, very practical and I love it. I have a hard time living without it and there are times when I will tell you that I would never move to an iPhone and I think Jason has heard me say that several times. In fact, I am really getting a Palm Pre after the conference. But you can't just go with what they see as negative about what you're trying to find. So ask them what they like about the product or ask them what they like about a competitor's product. Simply giving your client a shovel to dig a hole is not enough. Is there a hole, is there a goal really just to dig a hole? How many of you have dug holes in your backyard or in your parents backyard or, okay. How many of you did it just to dig the hole? No one? Okay, okay. When I was five, I dug a hole in my parents backyard. Really big one. But I can guarantee you it wasn't just to dig the hole. The reason I dug the hole, dug the hole is because I was trying to get to China because that's what everybody always told me. China's on the other end of the world, right? So I'm digging the hole and I've got a purpose and that purpose is I wanna get to China. It's to hold a post, build a pond or dig straight down to see the kangaroos, right? The other reason to focus on goals is goals don't change as quickly as technology does. Okay? Goals don't change as quickly as technology does. There are quite a few YouTube clips out there that talk about how the people in high school today are being trained on technology that will be extinct, not extinct, but out of date by the time they graduate. So four years of school and the stuff that they're being taught is brand new will be out of date by the time they graduate. Technology changes, goals don't. Typically the goal is always gonna be the same. This means that the more information I can get about the goal means the research that I'm doing will remain relevant longer. This is the part where I always get a... Andrew, I'm gonna pick on you a bit because I know that you think design is the big upfront design. How do you talk to users? When you go talk to users because you're supposed to do that, right? With agile. Ostensibly. Ostensibly. Okay. How do you do that? Well, I don't get on site very often because usually it's a phone call. Okay, so you're not gonna make it on site and that's unfortunately a harsh reality in the world today. A lot of us are having budget restraints where we're not able to get up to the customer side. So you give them a phone call and you talk to them on the phone. What we try to do is have a regular checkpoint or these sort of things where you're talking. We don't have time for customers but our customers tend to have, they're kind of a large installation of what we do and so you talk to them and say, what do you like? What phone do you like? You kind of give dialogue and basically, like you don't get the benefits of talking about where you need to see what they do all the time. Sure, sure. And I can tell you, you can make personas without that benefit. It's just one of the things that helps. But, so you're talking to the customers on a regular basis. How much time does that take? Maybe a full day, once a month. Okay, what do you do with the data once you've captured that information? Well, I think some of it is a new process that the last talk was discussing and then we try to break it down. It's not a very systematic analysis but it's more in the sense of what people are doing, what their gain points are and then coordinating that with our strategic functionality. And eventually, hopefully, that narrative ends up in the user stories, right? Ostensibly. Ostensibly, okay. The goal is to get that information to the user stories. The fact of the matter is, the research that you're doing for personas is not really that much different than you're already doing for your current project. You're going out, you're talking to customers, you're spending time and you're capturing that data in a way that you can access it again. And it's exactly the same thing with personas. There's no reason that I have to have a big four month project before my regular project that is just about capturing the information for personas. I can do it just in time. And the great thing, as I mentioned, is if I do that research, I can actually come back to that research not for this project, not just for the next project, but usually for three or four projects, I can use that same information that I gathered in those phone calls. So the nice thing is, is it really is just in time. I can use the information when I want it and access it because I've got it stored as personas. There was a question in the back there. Yeah, well I was just going to mention that you talked about how it's not always feasible to go outside of the customer role in today's world and a lot of our customers are all in the world, right? So it's not only infusible, it's also green. It's not very practical, environmentally. So while I think it's important to be on the side when you can in certain special case studies, I think also just being productive is important, just not going on a day-long trip and you could do a quick call to verify something. That will work. And I'm going to tell you, I'm one of those people, I'm not a purist, although I know several people that are, that will say, you know what, that's not enough. You gotta do more. Find someone locally. And there are times when you can do that. I am of the feeling that any interaction that you have with your user, any interaction that you have with your user is going to go into the plus column for your application. Okay? Is it our argument to, you know, that if there's a requirement of all the traveling, you know, broker or all over the world, is that you're not going to make the same argument for full location? Like well, you know, we want to have a clean, low room, but, you know, it's not that it's going to be as much of a problem, so we're also going to say, you know, we're going to do it all over the world. So I mean, I feel like it's going to be the same argument in both of them, but as we know, there's incredible value in having everybody to sort of do it the same way. There's incredible value of actually going to the application of a broker or something. Say, I'm not saying you can never do that, I'm just saying that it's often practical. Right. And so this is where we start getting into the black and white scenario, and that's when I'm saying, listen, if you can never do what you have, am I going to throw away the value that he might get by a phone call? No, I'm not. Are you ever going to be able to get the full value if you're not actually on site? No, you're not. But some value is better than none, right? It is not black and white, and so you do want to kind of balance the needs. It may be that your product is so new that you actually do need to be there right on site, that you actually need the value from seeing the worker in their environment. Or it may be that all you need to do is say, listen, you're on my product council, I've talked to you five times. What are the latest things that make you excited about using our product? What are the latest things that cause problems with our product? Capture the research where the user client works. It is invaluable in learning things that they cannot or will not communicate to you. That's the one thing that I do want to point out to you. When you're just doing the phone call, you may not get all the information because there are things that they just can't, that they don't understand on how to communicate to you. Do I have enough? How do I tell when I have enough for a persona? It's good to have detailed descriptions because it provides a narrative, right? That's why we have story cards. How do you know when a story card is enough? It's kind of hard to tell until you actually start doing them. And so this is one of those things I'm gonna challenge you to do is go out and start creating personas. And maybe they're not gonna be very good at the beginning. Maybe they're not gonna have enough information. Does that mean five minutes left? Okay. But the point is to gather the information in a narrative and to try and capture the essence of what they're trying to accomplish, what their goal is. Once you have a detailed description down, once you have a narrative of what that person does during the day, you can use quick reference tools. Fit it on the back of the story card, right? If I have a story card that says I need a user, so what was the story card that you had? I'm gonna change the user, I want to change the user. Okay, as a user, I have a big monitor, I want to be able to show more lines on my monitor so that I can get more done. Flip that card over and on the back and put an example of that user on the back. If this was the Russian guy, for example, you could put Vladimir so-and-so. What his goals are. His goals are to get the work done as quickly as possible. That means having a bigger workspace. That means any number of other things. But just capture it in a quick reference tool and put it on the back of the story card for which that story is written for. There's a user for that story. Just put it on the back, it's a great reference tool. But seriously, just capture the basics, put it in a narrative form, and then add as necessary. What do I want to avoid? If the persona is not done correctly, it will be ridiculed. I can guarantee you, even if it is done correctly, it will be ridiculed. So don't be afraid of a little ridicule. Overall, elaborate personas don't get your message across any better, okay? The story that I told earlier about the guy with a cup of coffee. It's great that I can add the cup of coffee to the persona because it does tell an important part of the story. He's not able to sit in front of his monitor long enough to finish this cup of coffee. Does it matter if the cup of coffee was an espresso? No, it doesn't. Makes no difference in the world. So don't be overly elaborate. Don't build a persona to justify a feature that you already have, okay? That's not what the personas are there for. The personas are there to help you develop features that you need. It lessens the credibility of the persona and it just doesn't ring true, okay? Unless you have a user that really does need that feature and then just build it around that user, not around the feature. How do I know when I'm successful? Well, first of all, your customers are gonna be really happy and you're gonna be making money and you're gonna just be rolling in the dough because that happens all the time, right? Okay, maybe not quite, but you get an understanding from the developers that you're working with for you product owners, right? One of the best examples that I can tell you of success that I've had was when I was working at Land Desk and it was an interesting scenario. We had set up posters, we'd gone out, done our interviews, brought back the information, made posters, put them up all around the company and there was a lot of ridicule. People would come by, draw mustaches on our people. They'd cut out heads and put different heads on the person every day. They'd modify the name of the persona. And so it will be ridiculed, right? That's the point that I already made. But then we brought in customers that actually matched that persona. We brought in customers that were server managers and sat them down in front of our developers and let the developers ask the questions. And when they sat there and talked to the developers, the developers started getting the slight going off over their head and it was very interesting because we actually had this lady come in. Our persona was a male but this lady came in and at the end of the presentation that she gave, a developer turned to me and said, that's Tim Jones. No, that's not Tim Jones. That happened to be the name of our persona but that's how influential the personas can be. It can override what you're actually seeing and let you understand in a real way what that person's really trying to accomplish. And again, they started fighting for the persona in their meetings. You'd go to daily stand up and that would be something they would bring up. Hey, wait a minute, we've got about Tim Jones. Tim Jones wants to go home. He doesn't want to be here anymore. Okay, resources you can use. The inmates are running the asylum, excellent book. And I promise it was on the top of my list before I knew you were coming. It is probably one of my favorite reads and it just really makes it crystal clear why it's important to have personas. Also about phase 3.0 by Alan Cooper. The persona life cycle, keeping people in mind throughout product design. It has some very interesting charts on how to build up a persona. They seem to be really good about helping you develop things to take around little quick reference charts. The user is always right, a practical guide to creating and using personas for the web. Sometimes we don't always have the opportunity to go out and do user analysis on site. And so this particular book talks about ways you can do surveys and how you can talk to a lot of people. As well as how you can conduct some interviews. And then rapid contextual design, a how-to guide to key techniques for user-centered design is also excellent. I would highly recommend any of these for you to read at any point in time. Here is just a sample. This would be a quick reference card, right? Because there's no detailed description here. But the thing that is most important there is that you see John's goals right there. They're immediately in front of you. And that's what all of you need to keep in mind when you're looking and developing software for your persona. That's all I have for today. I think we're running out of time. I think lunch is supposed to be rolling in. Do we have any quick questions before we roll the lunch? Okay, I'm assuming that's because the stomachs are growling that we don't have any questions, right? Okay, thank you very much for your time. Thank you.