The Big Idea: Promises are a conceptual UCD process I have developed to represent a product's "voice" when engaging with personas.
The practice of user-centered design (UCD) places people before products -- and rightly so. The challenge with this, is that people (and their needs) change -- often with frightening speed as they reach full stride in the use of a given system. Product managers wrestling with this shift, often feel conflicted placing demands of the business ahead of the user. Violations of user trust may frequently occur when this balance lost.
The construct used to document these needs in UCD, the persona, is a well recognized tool to aid communication and establish empathetic focus. Representing the typical user of a specific product, once written it is a fairly static representation and infrequently subject to change.
For the product, however, there is typically no voice in which to respond to a user's needs while also scripting an evolution of the product fulfilling business needs. In the absence of this perspective, one of two scenarios occur: 1) a persona's needs often end up simply outweighing product decisions or 2) product features disrupt the fine balance between user / business needs.
This is where Promises come in.
A promise is a user-centered design construct I have coined to represent a product design contract between product and persona. Promises signal operating guardrails for the product experience. Some, like "99.999% uptime" and "cross-browser compatibility" are never to be broken. Others, like "no advertising" and "minimal color palette" can be bent. A product designer establishes promises after consideration of the persona and product / business requirements.
As an example, let us consider Spotify making promises to users:
While Spotify's core mission and product feature set as a digital music service will not change, it must accommodate a rapidly-evolving user base that is acclimating to the world of cloud-based entertainment. It is within its core mission, that Spotify makes (and bends) certain promises to its user base.
Launching strictly as a cloud-based music player, at the beginning of its evolution, focus was critical. Therefore, most, if not all, promises are strictly kept.
But now, as its users have become more sophisticated and product development resources more widely available, the company is more inclined to bend some promises to seek the optimal user experience and grow. Today, Spotify has branched into a heavy social integration, video playback and events promotion. The promise to be only focused on music has bent to the evolving needs of the user and the business.
Properly scripted, promises can reflect the evolution of a product -- providing a sound product design framework that effectively rolls up product features and responds to users' changing needs.