Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Personas: Empathetic Focus (06 Nov 2004) The purpose of the Persona, I believe, is to add empathetic focus to the design. Empathetic focus. By focus I mean that the design must be clean and coherent. It is not a collection of features added willy-nilly through the life-span of the product, even if each feature by itself makes sense. Rather it is having a clear image of what the product is meant to be -- and what it is not meant to be -- and rejecting features that do not fit, only accepting ones that do. By empathy, I mean an understanding of and identification with the user population, the better to ensure that they will be able to take advantage of the product, to use it readily and easily -- not with frustration but with pleasure. Article URL: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/personas_empathetic.html Read 57 more articles from Don Norman sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: End-User Composition in Ubiquitous Computing Environments     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy