This is a response to a well-written article on Medium, entitled Becoming a More Thoughtful User Experience Designer, by Jake Lee Haugen. Read his article first, and follow him if you like it. Then read on.
Of all the things I have heard people say about defining their target users, or their UX strategy, the thing I hear most is that someone is designing for power users. Let me explain why that is impossible.
At first glance, this may give you a slight feeling of absurdity. Admittedly when I read the headline that “Dark UI Patterns” were an example of unintentional sexism, that was my first feeling. But one sentence later I had gained a new perspective on UX design.
Whether you are evaluating a new idea, or designing a new solution, or testing different versions of your product, there is always a chance you won’t improve on the existing design.
And that isn’t a bad thing.
In meetings with UX designers, other people often start sentences with, “from a UX perspective…" And I can’t help but wonder: what is their other perspective?
One word you’ll hear often in UX design is: intuitive. You may have a sense of what it means, but if you had to explain it, would you use the word “simple” in your explanation? If so, keep reading.
It can be hard to truly focus on the important parts of your design, or goal, or company, when thousands of things seem important every day. To keep this focus, you need to identify your Key Action, and work backwards from there.
There are a million analogies about what it is like to solve creative problems, whether in UX or not. Michelangelo said he could see the sculpture in the stone. Maybe to you it’s more like Sudoku or composing music.
To me, UX is like solving a crossword puzzle.
The word “viral” comes from the fact that digital things spread across the internet in the same way that actual viruses spread through groups of people in real life. Therefore, by understanding how real viruses are “designed” to get the job done, you can make your designs more “viral” as well.
We have come to the end of the week, but before we finish, we have one more measurement to look at. The characteristics of a virus mean that we need to consider time and population when we define a “user”.
