User advocacy is the practice of using designated spokespeople to facilitate interaction between users and designers of the products they use.
Contents
- Origins
- Developing user personas for the purpose of user advocacy
- Benefits of user advocacy in product design
- References
An advocate is a person who argues for or supports a cause or policy.
A user advocate could either be a person, as in a research study; a persona, fictional characters that represent a typical customer or segment of the customer base; or a community, such as participants of a public discussion board.
Origins
The idea of user advocates originated from large-scale software development projects. In such teams, a consensus is reached regarding the roles of a product designer (or systems designer) and the user experience (UX) analyst, that the two roles (designer and UX analyst) can no longer be effectively performed by the same individual(s) due to inherent conflicting interests. An example of such a conflict of interest would be a designer having to defend his own design decision about a product improvement, versus an alternative decision that could lead to a better user experience, but would negate the designer's original decision about how to improve the product.
Designer interaction with actual users on such large-scale projects would often be expensive and inefficient. In large-scale projects there is often a practical necessity for the division of labor. This means the person responsible for designing a product is likely to be far removed from the development of a product, and even further removed from traditional user experience studies, which analyze how users interact with a product versus how it was designed to be used. The degrees of separation inherent in these large-scale projects can create a disconnect between ambitious designers who risk creating ineffective products that they prefer to design, instead of designing what users want and need.
The idea of a consultant with expertise working with a client group has theoretical origins in models of process consulting, which focus on developing close relationships to work out joint solutions.
Developing user personas for the purpose of user advocacy
One practice of user advocacy asks designers to define their users collectively, as one person or a persona, and attach common attributes and characteristics of their typical users, taking into consideration many types of use case scenarios users typically encounter to aid with anticipating the needs and expectations of a user. From this persona and its associated traits, tendencies, use case scenarios, functional requirements and user expectations can be derived and provide refined specifications for product improvements to be developed.
Such a practice essentially channels access product designers to users by representing their needs in the form a persona or fictional character.
Benefits of user advocacy in product design
User advocacy also helps make the effects of design decisions easier to measure because the traits and characteristics of user personas often consist of crowdsourced suggestions from actual users. Suggestions for improvement are generalized and prioritized according to frequency, severity, or an alignment with corporate initiatives. As a result, design decisions become less about a designer and more about fulfilling the needs of users, as the suggestions for improvement are typically provided directly by the users themselves.