The Inmates Part 2

After ripping on designers and programmers for the first half of his book, Alan Cooper offers a shred of hope. Well... basically he promotes his own company... but that's beside the point. Cooper has three basic points to make in the last few chapters: create personas, set goals, and use scenarios. These three parts are closely related, as scenarios are run where personas try and accomplish their goals.

• Personas - detailed potential customers created by the designers. Each persona should accurately reflect a certain demographic of customers. The designers should focus on meeting the needs of set personas instead of those of everyone. It is better for 10% of people to love your product than for 100% of hate it.
• Goals - set things that customers want to accomplish. Goals are not tasks. Tasks are steps that must be undertaken to meet end goals. Creating realistic goals for your personas to carry out can help you define what your product should do.
• Scenarios - situations where goals are needed to be met by personas. Again, creating reasonable scenarios can help you design a product that is both functional and helpful. If in the course of running a scenario your persona cannot accomplish their goals, then you should modify your product.

That's pretty much it. In the last chapters, he goes over these key points and gives examples of how his company has used them. So if you want to be a good programmer, you should either hire them or follow suit. It seems that today we as computer scientists have these design tactics ingrained into us. When designing projects, we normally sit around and make up scenarios to describe our thoughts and ideas. It's hard to image that ten years ago, programmers didn't follow these concepts.