We’re all individuals … I’m not!

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum: “but it isn’t so nohow.”
‘Through the Looking Glass’,
Lewis Carroll

One of the problems of communicating with or making services available to large bodies of people is that everyone is different.

I was recently told off, on a well known communication organisation’s forum, by a ‘colleague’ for the apparently anachronistic use of the term “audiences” (your thoughts please?). Anyhoo – be it audiences, stake holders, participants … woddevah! … you need to understand who it is your engaging with (that better?) to craft your work to meet not only your needs but the needs of those you’re engaging with. If you don’t, you have to make ill-informed assumptions, so at best you’re fighting blind, at worst it’s vanity publishing, a waste of money and in some cases potentially litigious – a classic example of this is web sites intended to be used by disabled people, that aren’t accessible.

- Web Accessibility Guidelines (dry, dull and impenetrable, but ‘official’ guidelines from the W3C – the international standards organization for the World Wide Web)

In the miasma of “We are all individuals” (sorry Python) how does one tease out the relevant information about your intended (dare I say it) audience? The answer to this is manifold, but here are some quickies off the top of my very own head.

Personas
Originally a marketing technique, these are great fun to create and give you archetypes, illustrating broad demographic characteristics. The personas are intended to be characters that are believably real, so that those working on the same project can relate to them on an empathic level to encourage a focus on the intended audience as real people.

Typical characteristics include age, gender, educational level, financial position, motivation and goals for using your material, your response to their motivation and goals and often include a scenario concerning the persona needing to interact with your material.

I recently made a bunch of personas for a public sector organisation and even before the end of the presentation my stake holders were already taking about their proposed web content in ways like “Well, is this going to easy enough for Dean to understand?” and “We’re going to have to find a way to make sure Chrissie follows the process the way she needs to, not the way she wants to”.

I’m happy to write a whole post on personas if people are interested, but as a starter, I’d say have a look at things like:

- “The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web”. Good but unless you’re a stats geek, skip quite a few chunks about audience segmentation with pivot tables *snore*
- “Personas” – Wiki

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
MBTI uses a psychometric questionnaire to identify certain characteristics that show how individuals interact with people, situations and information. There are four pairs of polar characteristics (e.g. extrovert vs. introvert) and the questionnaire determines where we are on each scale to give a four letter ‘personality type’, which in turn carries a broad description of our behaviours. Case in point – I come out as an ‘extrovert, intuitive, feeling, judge’. You can read what the MB Foundation say they think I’m like under their entry for an ENFJ and feel free to disagree with only the bad bits.

How does it work in practice? I was talking to a senior project manager recently who told me a story about meetings he used to chair where no decisions were made, interminable debates always dragged the meeting over time and general dissatisfaction was felt by all. He then ran some Myers-Briggs tests on this group and realised that he was running his meeting all wrong for these people – they needed structure, not creative freedom. At the next meeting, he simply limited discussions to five minutes per topic with a decision to be taken at the end and ruthlessly enforced this. The result? Discussions were focussed, decisions were made and the attendees declared the meeting the most productive they’d ever had.

My first encounter with MBTI was in a workshop, run by Uma Palaniappan, an Ergonomist and Human Factors specialist at Rolls-Royce (the engines business, not the cars – Rolls-Royce sold the car business over 30 years ago, bet ya didn’t know that!). She split the attendees into four broad groups based on the MBTI results from the tests we’d done prior, and at the end of the workshop we presented our work to the group.

I presented my ‘extrovert intuitives’ group’s scruffy flip chart page, covered in shapes, squiggles and annotations, with my other ‘EN’s chipping in, while at the other end of the spectrum, the two quietly spoken ‘introvert sensors’ held up their A4 sheet with two or three lines written in small, red biro lettering and apologised as they’d not finished discussing what the question was really getting at. It was a fantastic example of how it IS possisble to pigeon hole people into identifiable groups – Moomins and Hemulins (for those that know).

- MBTI Wiki definition (sorry – lazy, I know)
- The Myers & Briggs Foundation (nastily ‘smiley’ site and with no definition of MBTI – aren’t they missing a trick? – but they appear to be specialists, so hey)

Now, I also wanted to talk about UCD (User-Centred Design), NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and something from the Dalai Lama, but as I’m approaching 1000 words and have already streaked past the boredom threshold of a number of you … they’ll have to save for their own special days.

But before I finish, I do need to mention that it’s not just about individuals. Another fascinating (read ‘geeky’) example of getting your ‘people things’ wrong is what happens when we get the wrong NUMBER of people in on something and why no government in the world has ever held a cabinet of more than 20 people for any length of time. Just read it – it’s a good story: “Explaining the curse of work”, New Scientist, 14 Jan 2009

Right. Done. Now, just remember: To paraphrase Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’: “We are all individuals … I’m not!”

The Long Dog

- “We are all individuals!!!“ Youtube ‘Life of Brian’ clip by Monty Python, for those of you living in a cave for the last 30 years (contains adult humour and religious irreverence)