There has been an interesting overlap of topics between two of my favorite reading materials:
1. Seth Godin wrote about three ways to think about your audience’s background.
2. Jared Spool posted to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) email list about his view of User Centered Design (UCD) and Activity Centered Design (ACD).
Seth is probably thinking about giving presentations, and knowing how much background knowledge your audience already has. (Should you explain what YouTube is? Does your audience already know what you said on this subject last year?) And here are his three options:
- Inquire. Ask some people in your target audience so you know what they do and do not already know.
- Assume. Make a reasonable guess about what they already know.
- Punt. Don’t ask or even guess. Just pretend everybody already has all the background they need.
His point is that too many people choose the third option, and end up missing a chance to connect with their audience.
Of course, this sounded all too familiar to me, since user experience professionals run into this question all the time. Who am I designing for? What do they need to know? What do they want to know? etc.
So it’s interesting that Jared Spool recently outlined 5 ways for UX professionals to think about their audience:
- User Centered Design. Discover at your audience’s goals, needs, and context before you design.
- Activity Centered Design. Consider only the activities or steps necessary for the design to function.
- Genius Design. People who have been designing for years, and have great intuition, can just follow their instincts.
- Self Design. Assuming you were the audience, what would you want?
- Unintended Design. This represents those who did not think about their design from anyone’s perspective. They just put down something they thought would work.
You can see an obvious correlation between the options Seth and Jared both put forward.
The clear takeaway is that, just like you would never give a presentation without thinking about your audience and what they need, you should never design a product (digital or otherwise) without thinking about your audience.
Thanks to the current emphasis on Design in business, we don’t see very many clients recommending Unintended Design any more. But I have seen clients try everything from Self Design to User Centered Design. And I can tell you that we always see better results as we move along the scale that diminishes personal bias and increases our user insights.
P.S. The discussion on IxDA about User Centered Design is actually really interesting (if you’re into that kind of thing). You can jump to my response or read the whole thing.