February 4, 2010
UX Tip: Banish Users Forever
I constantly hear sentences like “users want such-and-such.” I cringe every time. Users are not vague outsiders. To misquote Charlton Heston, users are made of people. They’re specific types of people with names and lives. And consciously or not, these folks have to decide whether your product helps them accomplish their goals. So, you need to know them intimately.
Let’s role play.
Pretend you have a recipe Web site. Think your “users” are people who want recipes? Nope. They’re people like Mary.
Mary is an unmarried mother of two. She works double-shifts when she can and is studying for her GED. She needs to feed her kids a cheap, nutritious dinner in under one hour because she has to study from 9pm to 12am.
You can picture her right? She might sound like someone you know. You can empathize with her deeply. And since you now know her, you can make informed decisions on her behalf.
Building for Mary.
So back to the recipe site. Assuming people like Mary are your priority, you might decide to:
- Build your database around easy-to-prepare meals.
- Show ingredient substitutions, in case she doesn’t have something on hand. Help her minimize trips to the grocery store.
- Add a “Find recipes that use…” search tool, so she can find recipes that use ingredients in her pantry.
- Allow recipes to be filtered by total prep and cook time.
- Write a series of articles called “One Pan Dinners.”
- List nutritional data with comparisons to daily allowances.
- Let her scale ingredients by the number of servings.
- Create a tool that scrapes Kroger’s sale items and emails her a customized weekly menu, replete with shopping list and coupons.
Furthermore, this newfound focus helps you decide what not to invest in. Knowing Mary, you might not:
- Spend time adding recipes that use squid ink and other Iron Chef-caliber ingredients.
- Court advertisers like Viking ranges, Le Creuset or Whole Foods.
- Build a MySommelier app for recommending wine pairings.
Here’s the point.
Real people use your product, not users. If you can’t describe them like they are your next-door neighbor, then you can’t design for them. Get to know them intimately and banish the word user from design discussions.
Need more convincing?
Sam Farber saw his arthritic wife struggling to control a carrot peeler. With this person and her situation in mind, he started prototyping kitchen utensils that were singularly focused on ergonomics. After testing and refining with real people, his work became the OXO Good Grips line. By considering real people deeply, his kitchen utensils redefined a household commodity and created a new market.