Media: Cooper on how Personas can prevent bad Design Politics

"Early and often: How to avoid the design revision death spiral" by David Cronin of Cooper is a long and informative essay on a topic that has probably woken many of us up screaming. This is the scenario:

'The objective of iterative design reviews is to narrow in on the appropriate solution, using the decisions of one meeting to improve the breadth, depth or fidelity of the solution for the next meeting. The most common affliction I've seen in the world of design at large is the "revision death spiral," where designs are repeatedly revised without any progress towards a coherent solution. The symptoms here are easy to recognize: an initial visual design direction review where the client "doesn't like" any of the proposed approaches; or subsequent meetings where the client decides that the currently chosen path should be scrapped in favor of a previously abandoned path. If every meeting involves re-considering first assumptions or second-guessing previous decisions, it is impossible to move forward.'

He also devotes some space to unfocused and unspecific feedback. And how to recognise divergent tastes.

Then he moves into suggestions and advice for practices to minimise the tensions. Though, he refers to an agency - client relationship throughout, he might equally be talking about user-centred designers working with other staff within a company.

Unsurprisingly for Cooper, after a discussion of the politics of communication and partipation, he discusses how to use personas at some length.

Cronin closes: 'this Practice Study is intended not as a recipe for success, but rather a list of ingredients.' What is interesting, is to see so far into how Cooper cooks.

Associated Link: Cooper: Early and often: How to avoid the design revision death spiral

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