Who are you Designing for? - Why designers should ask that question.

Over the years the importance of design principles and philosophy has spread through the very fabric of the software business. More companies are now looking into means of strengthening their offerings with greater usability and intuitive solutions.

So what is a good design? What really works for your consumers? The simple answer is, ask your consumers! Most products are tailored around a specific segment or type of customers. Understanding who they are and what they do would be the first step.

As designers, it's only instinctive to start sketching out designs and prototypes under the assumption that we know what may,will or might work for the product. But that is where the problem starts, the first line we draw is an assumption.

Lets put an example in to set some context. Lets take a very simple and widely used feature: SEARCH. Let's add a little more detail, Search for a e-commerce site. The first thing your going to do is slap in a text box and a button and name it "search".

No harm in that right, but in my perspective,do you really know

1. What you want your users to search?
2. Should they be searching in the first place?
3. How big in reality is your offering?

If your offering is small(say 3 product categories and 100 items in total), a proper information architecture model can resolve the need for search. You have 3 sections, each listing the products available and the user can view and select.

If your offering is larger than that, are you asking the user "Do you know what your looking for?".

This is because you have 2 major classifications of user roles:

• The casual catalog shopper: One who isn't looking for anything in particular and wouldn't mind clicking through to see what you have to offer.
• The serious shopper: One who know exactly what they want and are either looking for a bargain or availability.

If you think about it, as humans that is what we do when we go to the mall or a store.Based on which you can decide how much you need to stress on search. Again don't get me wrong here, I'm not debating if search is really required or not in an offering, I'm stressing on the importance of understanding who your users are.

Now in my opinion this is how I would start with my design process.

Raw materials for an Idea

1. I start by understanding the scope of the offering
2. I try to get a sense of the size of the offering
3. I will start writing up User Persona - one or 2 for each major classification I can think of.
4. I try to give these persona character I can relate to.

Starting with the Idea

1. Now that you know who is going to be using the offering, I then call some assumptions on what are they each going to be doing with the solution. (A good approach would be using post-its on a wall with operations or routes)
2. Soon I have a yellow plastered wall, I start to analyze the information to create use-cases.
3. Now match the use-cases to the different persona and now you have the basis for your offering.

Designing

1. I've started this in different ways. Creating a one size fits all and creating one for each persona and blending them together. Either which way you decide to take it, create more than one end-design variant.
2. SHARE! SHARE! SHARE! Present your designs to a variety of people, go to the extent of maybe asking your Gardner to have a look at your design, you may never know what you may uncover.
3. Soon after a few rounds of iteration you will begin to see how the design has evolved into a workable and usable product(at-least on paper).

User Testing
Now we are back to square one to be honest because what you have designed is a rendition of an idea with a good mix of assumptions and some degree of feedback.

1. I normally built out a prototype for my user testing and I write my test script scenarios based on the persona scoped for the product.
2. Then you find a group of people to test your solution. If i have a prototype, I sometimes include a little quiz that will help identify the best match between your test user and the persona before they get started on the test procedure. This way I know that there is some degree of relevance between my test user and my test scenarios.
3. I like to keep grading very strict to 3 levels : Pass(user understood the objective),Fail(user did not understand the objective) and Help(user was provided with some assistance). How I grade is as follows


• +1 for pass
• -1 for fail
• +1.5 for Help and pass
• -1.5 for help and fail.



4. Do the math and then you will have a good gauge of your designs success or failure.

Over the years I've practiced this for most projects that I work on and you will then begin to understand that there is a clear and definitive trend between the Business offering, the user base and designs that work for them. Soon you'll build up a formidable arsenal of design principles that have worked and you'll be able to quicken the time it takes for the pre-design process.

Please feel free to leave you comments and thanks for reading.