Alan Coopers’ About Face 2.0 talks extensively on the importance of personas during the design process. At Clearleft, we use many of the approaches he recommends. Just recently, I was leafing through the relevant chapters and was reminded of a smart breakdown Cooper gives on what lies at the core of personas: user goals. It’s often tempting to clump goals together under a universal banner, but Cooper’s breakdown reminded me of the dangers of such an approach. Different elements of the UI can target different goals so it’s important to keep the full range in mind.
Cooper divides user’s goals in to three distinct categories, noting that these can range from highly specific product expectations through to more general aspirations. These are End Goals, Experience Goals and Life Goals.
End Goals are perhaps the most obvious of the three and represent the user’s core objectives when engaging with a product. Hence, when I use my email application, one of my end goals may be to read my latest email from Joe Bloggs. Naturally, it’s these kind of objectives that are commonly prioritised by an effective UI – and rightly so – if I can’t read my email I’m unlikely to want to use the that product again.
Experience goals are a more emotive subject concerning the way a user aspires to feel when engaging with a product. As opposed to End Goals, Experience Goals are typically unconscious sentiments and as such can be difficult to articulate. When user testing, we often preach that a system should never undermine or insult the user’s intelligence. This is largely due to the damaging effect this can have on to experience goals. Each time we reduce a user’s sense of achievement, we are in danger of affecting their self-esteem or at least encouraging a sense of resentment to the system itself.
Life Goals extend beyond the context of the current system, representing the more general aspirations of the user. These range from the more tangible ambitions such as running your own business, buying a bigger house to something more personal like earning the respect of your peers. Although Life Goals are unlikely to be directly related to they way in which user interacts with a system, they remain useful in explaining the underlying drivers that bring the user to the product in the first place.
Due to their more tangible nature, End and Experience Goals are inherently more measurable than their Life counterparts. As a result, they often receive greater focus during design. But it’s important not to neglect Life Goals; Cooper notes that these rarely figure directly in the design of specific elements of an interface
and to an extent I’d have to agree. Nevertheless, as social software evolves, the potential for achieving Life Goals is greater. In fact, achieving all three is the mark of a great product.