Gerry McGovern

Designing intuitive products is more important than ever. We talk to customer experience consultant Gerry McGovern about the top tasks methodology he has created to identify, measure and improve what matters most to an organisations customers.

- Oliver Lindberg

“Anybody can code and wireframe but being able to put yourself into other people’s shoes and really understand them is the most valuable skill any digital team can have,” exclaims customer experience consultant Gerry McGovern (gerrymcgovern.com), founder and CEO of Customer Carewords. “And it’s so rare to find: there are so many UX people who don’t interact with their customers – what the hell is your purpose? They know all about tools and methods but the percentage of actual time that most digital people spend with customers – getting to know and understand them – is tiny. No wonder they create crap products that don’t fit!”

It’s for this reason that McGovern, who’s been in the business since 1994, isn’t a fan of personas anymore. “The theory is great but the practice has been very poor from what I’ve seen over the years. I used to do workshops on personas and I went to a lot of expense printing out 40 to 60 lovely A4 colour pictures of people. At a certain point I’d ask the attendees to select a picture of somebody that reflected the persona they’d designed. But the beautiful people always went first! They always selected the pretty ones and never the more normal ones!”

It then struck McGovern that the companies that really understood their customers didn’t need personas because they were constantly interacting with them. “Who cares if someone is 32 and wears such-and-such shoes? It’s all trivia and most of the time it’s got nothing to do with actually making the website better. I’ve had so many bad experiences that often when I hear an organisation has done personas, it’s almost a sign of immaturity. Sure, some of that stuff is useful but the quicker we humanise things, the better.”