I work as a Voice User Interaction Designer at a small, voice recognition software company in Bellevue. Oddly enough, none of our team of three have been to school for interaction design of any sort (though I do intend to pursue that degree at UW’s iSchool). Over the last month or two, our team and a collection of other interested people have been meeting every other week to discuss tenets of interaction design with the help of About Face.

Today I’m talking about Chapter 5, Modeling Users: Personas and Goals. In reading the chapter, I came across a segment I found very interesting:

User personas have user goals. These range from broad aspirations to highly pragmatic product expectations. User goals fall into three basic categories (Goodwin, 2001):

1. Life Goals
2. Experience Goals
3. End Goals

We describe each of these in detail in the following sections.

Life Goals
Life goals represent personal aspirations of the user that typically go beyond the context of the product being designed. These goals represent deep drives and motivations that help explain why the user is trying to accomplish the end goals he seeks to accomplish. [...]

• Be the best at what I do
• Get onto the fast track and win that big promotion
• Learn all there is to know about this field
• Be a paragon of ethics, modesty and trust

Life goals rarely figure directly into the design of specific elements of an interface. However, they are very much worth keeping in mind. A product that the user discovers will take him closer to his life goals, and not just his end goals, will win him over more decisively than any marketing campaign. Addressing life goals of users makes the difference (assuming other goals are also met) between a satisfied user and a fanatically loyal user.
— Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin; About Face, page 64

This really hit home for me — particularly when I apply it to why I’m such a google fanatic. The suite of google applications (gmail, google calendars, google documents, google reader, google search, and iGoogle in particular) all help me achieve these life goals:

• Having my life organized
• Control of my life and what goes on in it
• Ability to have a wealth of information easily and always available
• Efficiency

Any tools, really, that help me achieve those goals get my instant approval and loyalty, assuming, of course, that the other two goals are met.

Experience Goals
Experience goals are simple, universal and personal. [...] Experience goals express how someone wants to feel while using a product or the quality of their interaction with the product.

• Don’t feel stupid
• Don’t make mistakes
• Feel competent and confident
• Have fun (or at least not be too bored)

Experience goals represent the unconscious goals that people bring to any software product. [...] People have an unconscious desire to be treated with decency and dignity and to be supported, not chastised.

When software makes users feel stupid, their self-esteem drops and their effectiveness plummets, regardless of their other goals. Their level of discomfort and resentment also increases. Enough of this type of treatment and users will be primed to use any chance to subvert the system. Any system that violates personal goals will ultimately fail, regardless of how well it purports to achieve other goals.
— Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin; About Face, page 64-65

In addition to all of the experience goals above, I want to feel:

• In control; like I can manipulate the interface to do exactly what I want and display information exactly how I want.
• Like I have learned it quickly, but can still continue to learn more about it the longer I use it.
  (Combination of “feel competent” and “don’t feel bored” above)

These are really a more specific application of my broader “life goals” and how they apply directly to products.

End Goals
End goals represent the user’s expectation of the tangible outcomes of using a specific product. [...] End goals must be met for users to think that a product is worth their time and money; most of the goals a product needs to concern itself with are, therefore, end goals such as the following:

• Find the best price
• Finalize the press release
• Process the customer’s order
• Create a numerical model of the business

— Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin; About Face, page 65

These end goals relate to very specific products, and thus every designer should assess end goals for each product they make, no matter how similar or related. For instance, while I expect integration between gmail and calendars, my end goals for them are very different. For email my end goals are:

• Read, compose, and send email
• Filter email automatically into a folder hierarchy
• Quickly search mail for email based on subject, content, sender, etc
• Keep my list of contacts organized, useful and complete
• Read email conversationally
• Save all web-based conversations with people (im, email, etc.)
• Feel organized wherever I am, and not be dependent on a locally installed program.

While for calendars my end goals are:

• Be able to easily create events and manipulate their time, calendar, location and participants
• Create different calendars (work, personal, etc.) that can be viewed overlapping with different colors
• Sync my outlook work calendar with an online calendar so I can access it anywhere. As an extension of that, be able to choose which calendar it syncs to
• Be able to access my calendar anywhere
• Have a variety of notifications available (email, sms, popup, etc.) and different variables of time to have the reminder go off in
• Different levels of privacy for calendars
• Ability to embed calendars elsewhere
• Different calendar views (month, week, 5 day, etc.)

The funny thing is neither gmail nor google calendars meet all my end goals. Gmail comes closer than google calendars, but regardless, I am still loyal to both applications because they both meet most of my end goals, all of my experience goals, and help me achieve my life goals. Furthermore, with google, I have fairly high confidence that if I suggest a feature, at some point or another it will be implemented — the applications are not static.

Combining End Goals and Experience Goals
End goals have more appeal than experience or life goals, especially to sober businesspeople and programmers. True to their nature, they create software that – although it admirably fulfills the end goals – fails utterly to satisfy the experience goals of the user. Even if end goals are recognized and satisfied, users feel poorly about themselves and the product if experience goals are not also met. Sure, they get their work accomplished, but it’s not a pleasant or empowering experience. On the other hand, if your software ignores the practical and serves only the user’s experience goals, you have designed a toy, not a business application.
— Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin; About Face, page 65

What are your life goals and what applications/products/software do you use to help you achieve them? What sort of experiential and end goals do you expect out of your products? Which of those categories are more important to you, and what balance of those goals makes you loyal to a product? What are some applications/products/software you are loyal to and what about the experience makes you loyal?