Personas help us gain a better understanding of our customers' needs and anticipate how they might act in situations where direct communication with them isn’t feasible.&nbsp;But they are inherently an amalgamation, an average of attributes that we imagine our average customer has. And there’s no such thing as the average customer.

The problem with personas

<blockquote>As we move toward building intelligent, responsive systems, we need new tools that further embrace diversity and respect multiple contexts and capabilities.</blockquote><blockquote>Designing based on assumptions leads stereotypes.</blockquote>

The dilemma with designing on assumptions

A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups.&nbsp;It shows how that motivation can change depending on context.&nbsp;

Persona spectrums: a motivation, not a character

There’s no such thing as the average customer. Learn why we should kill the persona and embrace the spectrum of human needs and motivations.

Stashed ideas

Kill Your Personas

WhatsApp designs and builds its product with specific principles in mind. These principles are at the core of the decision-making process. Here are some examples of these shared values:<ul><li>The interface should feel native to the device the person is using</li><li>The app should be lightweight and require as little storage as possible</li><li>The interface should be simple</li><li>User actions and animations should be quick to respond</li><li>Features should provide obvious utility so they require little introduction</li></ul>

Strong principles

<ul><li>When working on Facebook, sometimes a designer is tasked with introducing a new feature. This can be challenging because Facebook already has many useful features. One technique they use is alerting people to the new features they might find value in.</li><li>WhatsApp approaches this problem in a different pragmatic way. They try to design and build features that are obviously useful. If the feature needs explanation, it’s not ready.</li></ul>

Utility driving engagement vs. engagement driving utility

Tools help you do your job more easily, but take a step back every once in a while and make sure you can do the work without the help of the tools.&nbsp;At the very least, it helps you keep perspective on how useful the tools are.

Design tools and design skills

<ul><li>At Facebook, you start with a problem. Then you propose a solution. If that gets the team excited, you test it. If it tests well, you start to build it and you take it out for a small test to see if it solves the problem. If it solves the problem well, you build it out to have a rich feature set and release to a wider audience.&nbsp;</li><li>At WhatsApp, you start with a problem. You work on a spectrum of solutions. You start to whittle it down to the solutions that seem to solve it best and adhere to the principles of the app. You grind on the best solution until you think nothing is wrong with it.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Move slow and deliberate

I’ve been a product designer at Facebook close to four years. I’ve worked on a variety of teams such as Groups, Sharing, and Privacy. At this time last year, I got an exciting opportunity to begin…

One Year Designing at WhatsApp

Getting up and drawing a Venn diagram is a great way to appear smart. It doesn’t matter if your Venn diagram is wildly inaccurate, in fact, the more inaccurate the better.&nbsp;Even before you’ve put that marker down, your colleagues will begin fighting about what exactly the labels should be and how big the circles should be, etc. At this point, you can slink back to your chair and go back to playing Candy Crush on your phone.

Draw a Venn diagram

If someone says “About 25% of all users click on this button,” quickly chime in with, “So about 1 in 4,” and make a note of it. Everyone will nod their head in agreement, secretly impressed and envious of your quick math skills.

Translate percentage metrics into fractions

There comes a point in most meetings where everyone is chiming in, except you. Opinions and data and milestones are being thrown around and you don’t know your CTA from your OTA. This is a great point to go, “Guys, guys, guys, can we take a step back here?” Everyone will turn their heads toward you, amazed at your ability to silence the fray. Follow it up with a quick, “What problem are we really trying to solve?” and, boom! You’ve bought yourself another hour of looking smart.

Encourage everyone to “take a step back”

Always bring a notepad with you. Your rejection of technology will be revered. Take notes by simply writing down one word from every sentence that you hear. Nod continuously while doing so.&nbsp;If someone asks you if you’re taking notes, quickly say that these are your own personal notes and that someone else should really be keeping a record of the meeting. Bravo compadre. You’ve saved your ass, and you’ve gotten out of doing any extra work. Or any work at all, if you’re truly succeeding.

Nod continuously while pretending to take notes

Make a mental note of the engineer in the room. Remember his name. He’ll be quiet throughout most of the meeting, but when his moment comes everything out of his mouth will spring from a place of unknowable brilliance.&nbsp;After he utters these divine words, chime in with, “Let me just repeat that,” and repeat exactly what he just said, but very, very slowly. Now, his brilliance has been transferred to you. People will look back on the meeting and mistakenly attribute the intelligent statement to you.

Repeat the last thing the engineer said, but very very slowly

It’s important to find out if things will scale no matter what it is you’re discussing.&nbsp;No one even really knows what that means, but it’s a good catch-all question that generally applies and drives engineers nuts.

Ask “Will this scale?” no matter what it is

Whenever someone gets up from the table and walks around, don’t you immediately respect them? I know I do. It takes a lot of guts but once you do it, you immediately appear smart.&nbsp;Fold your arms. Walk around. Go to the corner and lean against the wall. Take a deep, contemplative sigh. Trust me, everyone will be shitting their pants wondering what you’re thinking. If only they knew (bacon).

Pace around the room

“Sorry, could you go back a slide?” They’re the seven words no presenter wants to hear. It doesn’t matter where in the presentation you shout this out, it’ll immediately make you look like you’re paying closer attention than everyone else is because clearly, they missed the thing that you’re about to brilliantly point out.&nbsp;Don’t have anything to point out? Just say something like, “I’m not sure what these numbers mean,” and sit back. You’ve bought yourself almost an entire meeting of appearing smart.

Ask the presenter to go back a slide

You’re probably afraid to step out of the room because you fear people will think you aren’t making the meeting a priority. Interestingly, however, if you step out of a meeting for an “important” phone call, they’ll all realize just how busy and important you are.&nbsp;They’ll say, “Wow, this meeting is important, so if he has something even more important than this, well, we better not bother him.”

Step out for a phone call

If someone asks what you think, and you honestly didn’t hear a single word anyone said for the last hour, just say, “I honestly didn’t hear a single word anyone said for the last hour.”&nbsp;People love self-deprecating humor. Say things like, “Maybe we can just use the lawyers from my divorce,” or “God I wish I was dead.” They’ll laugh, value your honesty, consider contacting H.R., but most importantly, think you’re the smartest looking person in the room.

Make fun of yourself

Like everyone, appearing smart during meetings is my top priority. Sometimes this can be difficult if you start daydreaming about your next vacation, your next nap, or bacon. When this happens, it’s…

10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings

Developers are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices. The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand and ensure that our ethics are ever-present in our code.We’re approaching a time where software will drive the vehicle that transports your family to soccer practice. There are already AI programs that help doctors diagnose disease. It’s not hard to imagine them recommending prescription drugs soon, too.

Being asked to code something deceitful

If you write code for a living, there’s a chance that at some point in your career, someone will ask you to code something a little deceitful – if not outright unethical. I wrote my first line of…

The code I’m still ashamed of

The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive.Abuse doesn't just mean the obvious: violent threats. It also means the endless bickering, the predictable snark, the general atmosphere of little violences that permeate the social web…and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it.

The great problem tech and media have

But it's not. The social web became a nasty, brutish place. And that’s because the companies that make it up simply do not not just take abuse seriously…they don’t really consider it at all.&nbsp;Abuse is killing the social web, and hence it isn’t peripheral to internet business models — it’s central. It has significant chilling effects: given a tipping point, people will simply stop using a network, and walk away.

Twitter could have been a town square

You can create the most perfect code in technological existence — but if all it’s used for is to relentlessly demean, bully, assault, torment, pick on, trample, bicker with, shout at people, well, it’s a pretty good sign that people aren’t using it for much of value. And that is a central point.&nbsp;When a technology is used to shrink people’s possibilities, more than to expand them, it cannot create value for them. And so people will simply tune it out, ignore it, walk away from it if they can. For the simple fact is that technologies which devalue us do not create value for us.

Technology and possibility

It’s early summer, and I’m in Dupont Circle. Something’s off. People, I notice, seem to be suddenly tweeting much less lately. But I’ve got a book to finish, so I file the observation away to…

userresearch

The problem with personas

Kill Your Personas

Strong principles

One Year Designing at WhatsApp