Personas News & Articles

Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for the first thing they do. They'll likely do the exact same thing everyone else does: find themselves on the map.

It doesn't matter what kind of map it is, whether it's of their neighborhood or an amusement park. They'll open the map and find something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or their favorite roller coaster.

Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space.

While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.

We’re all dressed up or down and off to go interneting. And by interneting, we mean we’re going content consuming.

You’re dressed up. I’m dressed up. So what we want to ask is: What’s your content wearing?

No, this isn’t your CMS trying to seduce you. It’s a valid question. As we’ve discussed many times here, there’s much more to content than management. You are what you wear or what you eat…or some such thing. And the same goes for your content. So let’s talk about its personality.