Blog Post — Podcast Reflection

Listening to the podcast “Designing for the unintended”, I learn multiple key aspects which I have never really thought had a connection with design and design thinking. The podcast shows and suggests how the products and experiences we design, can often have ‘unintended’ users, people who are utilizing the product for reasons and outcomes which the product was not actually intended for. In most cases, this can be a very hard situation, when this type of users are utilizing our products for bad or negative reasons.

One of my biggest learnings from the podcast and something which I certainly found as a very effective technique, is to create user personas with ‘unintended’ characteristics. As mentioned in the podcast, ‘criticizing’ or looking at how our product can be used in negative ways can be very hard, especially considering all the effort inputted into a product which of course you want people to use in the correct way. Therefore, having predefined user personas with ‘negative’ or ‘unintended’ characteristics, can definitely help us and allow us to also design for them, and keep in mind the threads that we can have and how to mitigate them as we are keeping in mind that particular user group (personas).

Additionally, the podcast also emphasized and showed the importance of cross functional collaboration during these processes. Working with different individuals that have different expertise and knowledge, can allow us to better identify the different user personas, identify threads and eventually enable us to better design for the ‘unintended’. Although this might seem intimidating or frustrating, I think it is a great practice, as it enables us to mitigate risks and design a better product with a higher chance of being utilized in the best possible way, as unintended users were also evaluated along the process.