Leveraging Lived Experience as a Designer
“You are not the user.” If you’re a designer, you have probably heard this many times. However, it’s also possible that you have worked on a project where you are the user. If you were a design student in university, you probably worked on a design project where the stakeholder was college students. If you work as a designer at a tech company, you’re probably designing a product that you yourself use everyday. There can be a lot of value when you rely on your lived experiences, but it’s important to remember that your experience doesn’t generalize to everyone.
“You are not the user” is meant to remind the designer that they aren’t the stakeholder, so they need to conduct thorough user research to truly understand the community and problem they’re designing for, rather than pull from their own experience. Its goal is to prevent tunnel vision, such that certain user perspectives closest to the designer are not weighted more heavily than other relevant perspectives that might be further from, or less accessible to, the designer.
So, what if the designer is working as a community member on a project taking a more community-driven approach to design? This isn’t an impossible situation, but it brings up multiple questions to consider. How does the designer play a hybrid role where they actually are an end user for that project? What if the project consults a stakeholder group that the designer is also a part of? I believe that saying “you are not the user” shouldn’t be taken as fact so quickly, as there are ways a designer’s own lived experience can be leveraged to improve their work on a design project.
Through ethnographic research in a design course, I witnessed a design student leverage her own lived experience to support her project. This student was working on a project to address mental wellness on her college campus. As she thought about her own experiences with physical spaces on campus, her mind went to the campus library. Because she had spent countless hours at the library studying, she knew first hand how that space can become associated with stress and anxiety, and she knew her friends had similar experiences.
With this in mind, she considered how the stress associated with the library could be off-set and began brainstorming possible solutions, including a space to play games and socialize, a space to relax, and an area where students can talk to others to receive advice. She narrowed in on a relaxation space, and prototyped by pulling aside tables in the library to create a space with plants, cozy pillows, and snacks. After numerous iterations of prototyping and testing, she found that the users of the space felt relaxed and de-stressed after visiting.
In this example, we can see how she leveraged her own lived experience as a student to guide her project. She was successful because she continuously tested and confirmed her choices with her users after key decisions during the design process. However, it also shows how leveraging lived experience can be a setback. Given more time, perhaps she would have considered stakeholders who were not as close to her — for example, students using the library for reasons other than studying, perhaps for meetings or to socialize. In making use of her own experience, she could deeply consider a user group most like herself, but at the expense of missing other possible user groups that don’t share her experiences.
Leveraging lived experience can provide rich information on the experience of some people in a user group, but at the risk of erasing or lacking a depth of understanding into the experiences of many others who matter. It can cause valuable perspectives, perspectives that differ from the designer’s, to be lost. Even more concerning, the perspectives that are lost are often from those who have historically been marginalized — whether underrepresented in the design profession or overlooked as stakeholders. It can lead a design project down the wrong path, as the designer designs for a limited group, failing to create a more inclusive solution. This is often most prevalent in projects with limited time, such as student projects, as a student designer has to resort to relying on their experience because they don’t have time to address others.
Despite this, I still believe that there are ways to mitigate the possible pitfalls of designers leveraging their own experiences. Even if you are only able to access the input of a few stakeholders, a designer can work to mitigate this by iterating on and testing their solution multiple times during the design process. Additionally, if you make changes to your design solution, make sure that change is backed by some form of user research. During my time as a design student, my professors always had me do multiple iterations of user testing, even if it was with only one user. While this definitely can’t make up for the valuable input of a diverse group of stakeholders, doing this allowed me to justify my decisions given the time and resources I had, while keeping in mind that there were still community members and stakeholders whose voices I hadn’t heard.
Because of this, I believe that the statement “you are not the user” should not be taken as law in the design world. By being intentional at every step of the design process and remembering to pull in perspectives other than just their own, leveraging lived experience can be a valuable tool for designers, especially when working on a project with limited time.
