This magnificent post from Ben Bashford reminded me of another potential trap in the world of designing behaviours and personas for things: demo mode. It's the showroom version of the product, which, inevitably you can't switch off without rooting through the manual. Below is one of the demo modes of our car stereo. (I'm convinced there's a more elaborate and showy version too - but i can't get it to perform on demand. It's slightly annoying, but not annoying enough for me to do anything about.)
Attract mode and idle mode are designed - they're part of the product in use. Demo mode isn't intended to be part of its ongoing life but it ends up being there, because we forget to design it out. And those too-small-to-be-annoyed-about things will add up when they're all over the house. Something to think about.
Anyway.
demo mode from russelldavies on Vimeo.
