User research on the Ford Fiesta: the view from some real life Antonellas

Ford is proud of the new Fiesta. It's been Europe's best selling car, pretty much every month since its launch. And having spent much of last weekend driving one, and clobbered through the 400 mile Newcastle to London journey in one, in one go - it's easy to see what all the hype is about. The car is good. It looks relatively fast, even when it's stood still. It drives like any contemporary European Ford (which is to say, extremely well), and Ford considers it good enough to be going on sale in the US next year. It's even full of so-called big car features - keyless entry, leather uphulstery, ipod integration - that sort of thing.

But back to that word 'hype'. Part of Ford's aggressive push around the new Fiesta has been to talk about the importance of utilising persona-based design techniques. A design persona is a completely fictional character, created by the marketing and design departments, to which everyone involved in the development of the car can refer. The persona 'personifies' many of the lifestyle attributes that the car's target customer would have. They behave, have the same types of job, same types of friends and like doing the same types of things that the real world customer will do. And in the case of the Fiesta, the persona's name is Antonella.

According to press quotes from Ford designer Moray Callum, who we interviewed earlier this year:

"Antonella is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties. She is also completely imaginary. She was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, a design study that served as the basis for the latest-generation Fiesta."

However, while Ford has been keen to play up the importance of design personae in its current processes, and especially the one behind the Fiesta, many others - including ourselves, are sceptical about their usefulness. As Ben Kraal suggested, in response to the New York Times piece on this subject:

"Are the personae the result of long study of buyers and owners, aggregates of hundreds of tiny specific observations of many real people or are they simply invented from thin air?"

He goes on to suggest that he suspects it's the later, based on the following statement, again from Callum:

"Antonella cares more about the design and function of her telephone than that of her car. Her priorities in the Fiesta are visible in the car’s central panel, where controls inspired by those of a cellphone operate the audio and air-conditioning systems. Designers working on the Fiesta referred to the shape framing the dashboard instruments as “Antonella’s glasses.”"

So when Ford lent us a Fiesta recently, we wanted to try to test this development methodology's success using some real people (among other things - watch this space for more Fiesta content). Believing that, in fact, one of the biggest 'problem areas' that exists in car design today centres around designers rarely getting to spend time with, nor being able to understand the real needs and desires of their customers, we carried out some research in the real world... which consisted of shoving a video camera in people's face, and asking them what they thought.

We don't suggest this is conclusive, nor is it particularly scientific, but this five minute video features eight young professional 25-35 year olds who live and work in London - all of whom are target market customers for the Fiesta. Specifically, we've edited this video around their views on that interior design, inspired by Antonella's phone keypad and sun glasses:

If you haven't watched the video above, then this is your 'spoiler alert' warning. The views we got were quite interesting. Specifically, boys, rather than girls, seem much more won over by the car's centre console design. And judging by our research, the women we spoke to are looking for something in a car's interior that is much more sophisticated and classy than the keypad of Antonella's (presumably now three year old) mobile phone.

Does this illustrate the pitfalls in using design personae, such as Antonella? Partially, yes. While it is easy to see the usefulness of one dreamt-up character around which everyone on the project can focus; a made up character who can't answer back is very different from real people, in the real world who have real lives. Understanding what those people want from their car, asking them the right questions, and then being able to filter the information they provide and turn it into something that they never dreamt was possible, is to me the definition of the role of a good designer.

As one of the people in the video later said, the problem with the Fiesta's interior, is that it feels like something that "was designed by a bunch of male designers, who think they know what women want in the interior of a car", and that "in three years times, it will look terribly dated". Which is a shame, because otherwise the Ford Fiesta is an (externally) good looking, grown up, but still very fun to drive small car.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 26th Auguest 2009

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoing The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009, and the Ford Fiesta was lent to us by Ford UK's press department free of charge. We have an independent brief, and are free to say what we want. If you don't think that's the case, we want to hear from you.

Comments

[Carl]

Coming from a design school where the curriculum was very focused on design research, I've come to understand how important personae (really? is that the plural? huh...) can be in a design. However, I do feel that it has become a "buzz" design idea, of sorts, much like the other fun "buzz" idea of "sustainability". Much like how many corporations jump on the "green" bandwagon, creating a persona for a product has also come into the mainstream marketing of said product. As I was taught, and many other young designers, a persona is not simply "made up", but it is indeed based on something/someone that is real, based on users and their actions; designers need to watch real people, study their actions, figure out what's going on in their head.

Creating a swoopy dash because "Antonella cares more about the design and function of her telephone than that of her car", and not getting actual feedback from real users is as irresponsible design-wise as saying "This product is sustainable because it uses recycled materials."

Honestly, I support persona use in design. But it's only a small part of the big equation; you can never ignore real users and their feedback.

[Robin Brown]

I've used personae in developing websites before under the direction of others and found them rather problematic. Even though derived from real user data, I think there are big issues with selection and interpretation of that data, whether conscious or subconscious.

Simply, I believe that you'll end up with a very close approximation of what you were planning to do anyway, and are likely to sculpt personae to fit these pre-conceived ideas.

All of which kinda begs the question 'which came first?'. And secondly, is it just a bit of marketing gimmickry?

There's a term for all this I can't bloody well remember...

[Drew Smith]

Having just watched, listened and presented at a user experience conference (shout out to the UXAustralia mob!), it was interesting to see the range of responses to the use of personae in the UX arena. People were, for the most part, pretty disparaging because personae represent the idealised, or indeed, idolised customer whose constituent character traits and tastes have been picked at will from endless reams of market stats.

The real-world value? Almost nil according to some attendees because these creations give designers no real insight into the actual lives and minds of the people they're designing for. One answer? Sending designers out with an ethnographic toolkit to gain the insights for themselves...

[San Fernando Valley Ford]

Marketing seems pretty strange though; I never pictured the demographic for the Fiesta to be a 28 year old woman who loves clubbing. I always thought the Fiesta was more of a sedate car for older folks or a family perhaps or maybe for a college student. This could be true in Europe (or Rome in this case) but not necessarily in the United States. 28 year old single women in the U.S prefer to drive something a tad more upscale usually like BMW.

However, I do love the backlit instruments in the Fiesta (from the photo) and in hot pink no less!