Are we reducing the dimensionality of people?
Tim Brown defines Design Thinking as “A human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
In this article, I’m going to reflect on how we as designers attempt to meet the needs of the people while problem-solving, through various people-based models and frameworks such as personas, empathy maps, archetypes, and mental models to name a few. Do we really focus on the people in these models that are supposed to represent them? How accurately do these frameworks speak for the people?
Today, our people-models are based on the concept of fictional users instead of real people. They place too much emphasis on unimportant details. They tend to focus more on characteristics and less on the behaviour of the people they represent. Characteristics like demographics, financial capabilities, and technological advancements are all bits of information that project a 2-dimensional picture of what humans really are. We miss the cognitive abilities, the emotional needs, and the identities that humans are capable of.
How can we expect to learn about the user or design for them without delving into these aspects?
It is important to ground these models in as much evidence as possible so that they can paint an accurate picture of the problems and opportunities at hand along with the user’s aspirations and needs. Any lack of research means the models may be full of errors, assumptions, and prejudice that have been used to fill in the gaps, therefore making the data unreliable. The research data needs to be updated and validated regularly, to accurately provide relevant insights about the users.
Despite all of this, people-models are not all inconsequential because no matter what the level of imagination, it gives us a head start on all of the data collected through research to represent a generic picture of what the user expects.
What a framework should tell us about the users is what they think, what they feel, what they are trying to accomplish, and what is getting in their way so that we as designers can start to think about how we can help. Our goal as designers should be to communicate the lives of the users as is and to put the right set of users at the centre of the process.
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