Read this if you want people to love what you do
Almost all of us create value for others in some way. This can range from the simple act of giving advice to a friend, to the more complex task of designing a product that solves a customer’s problem. In this post, my goal is to help you gain a better understanding of your audience: their needs, abilities, values, and preferences. So that you can have the greatest impact on their lives and offer them the most value, this knowledge can then be used to create experiences (products or services) that are tailored to your people’s specific needs, ensuring that the value you provide is both meaningful and beneficial to them.
Design for People
The ground: a chemical compound? Homogenous or heterogenous mixture? What is Rocky Road? These were the thoughts racing through my head as I sat in the front row of a CHEM 101 mid-term lecture hall at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
I was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and while I had grown up enjoying vanilla, chocolate, and pistachio ice cream, I had never heard of the Rocky Road flavor. At the time of the test, I had been living in the States for just over three years. I had arrived as a nineteen-year-old refugee with only twenty dollars in my pocket.
This was the question on the test that had me confused:
Select all that apply: Which of the following mixtures is homogenous
1. Air 2. Salt water 3. Rocky Road
My confusion with a chemistry test and lack of knowledge of ice cream flavors highlighted a design failure. The designer, my college Chemistry professor, assumed all her students were familiar with the ice cream. This did not take into account my knowledge “ability”, resulting in a gap between the creator of the experience and the person going through it. This gap is what caused the design to fail.
We’re constantly exposed to designs that don’t meet even basic standards. From minor issues like confusing exam questions, to major ones like presidential election ballots. Bad design can have serious, far-reaching consequences, so it’s essential to make sure designs meet the needs of the people they’re intended for. Other examples of bad experience design:
Unintuitive user interfaces that make it difficult for users to navigate the product or service.
Experiences with steep learning curves that make it difficult for users to understand how to use them.
Experiences that don’t address user needs or don’t solve the user’s problem.
Experiences that are not accessible to users.
Experiences that are not designed with the user’s safety or privacy in mind.
Experiences that do not align with the user’s values.
Experiences that fail to consider the user’s preferences can be joyless.
Experiences that are not designed with scalability in mind, making them difficult to update or expand.
When it comes to designing for people, it’s important to take into account their needs, abilities, values, and preferences. We’ve got to make sure that our solution is valuable and helps with the problem. I see design as the intelligence behind creation, so understanding user needs is the key to giving them something of worth. It’s also essential that our solution is accessible, taking into account physical and mental abilities, whether they’re permanent or temporary. To make sure we provide what our audience needs, we need to really get to know them and tailor our solutions to their specific needs and abilities.
Aligning our solution with the target demographic’s values is also critical. As Simon Sinek once said, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” We must be sure that our solution aligns with their values, not ours. This means we need to be mindful of the culture and the values of our target audience, so that the solution we design resonates with them. We should also go the extra mile and offer our users a delightful experience by catering to their preferences, taste, and style. This could include offering a wider range of options or providing customisable features that allow users to tailor the solution to their needs. This is the essence of design: problem-solving, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the experience we offer is valuable and tailored to our users.
