Go Beyond Just Knowing Your Audience. Connect with Them.
Recently, I read Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, it offers a brilliant perspective on creativity from a music producer who’s worked with many of the great musical legends. Rubin believes all art comes from a personal connection with a greater source. A source we are all connected to.
While there’s truth to this, I believe an intimate connection with an audience still remains a critical source of direction and inspiration.
There’s a distinction between art and most creative work that involves fulfilling functional needs. Our ideas may come from elsewhere, but our ability to create meaningful and viable work requires a deep connection with customers.
Since grade school English classes, we’ve been told that all writing should be directed toward a specific audience. So, to a degree, this is nothing new.
That question expands into our relevant craft: Who is going to use this product, work in this office, watch this film, or read this novel?
The UX process
In the field of user experience design, most of our work is understanding customer needs and their behavior. These practices are applicable across most creative fields.
I’ve observed many similar practices incorporated by others like comedians, musicians, and filmmakers.
As UX designers:
We conduct interviews with users and customers to understand their challenges, desires, and overall perceptions.
We review data on how people are using our products. Where are they most engaged? Where do we see unexpected drop-offs?
We do split testing by exposing different customer groups to different versions of a screen and observing which is more effective at producing the desired customer behavior.
We test prototypes. Prototypes are created and we learn what works about them by observing customers using them.
We observe people in their natural environments to identify their specific needs and expectations.
For a more nuanced understanding, we might conduct a diary study where people are asked to use our products and take daily notes on their experiences.
Most of these activities are then followed by some form of synthesis where we make sense of the information and decide on a direction.
The process of creating great products and services involves knowing which tactics to employ for the appropriate situations.
Findings might be mapped to customer archetypes and personas — Artifacts we build of different customer groups which include basic information about wants and needs, their relevant knowledge and understanding, and some basic demographic data.
Most of our work is on malleable software, which lends itself to constant iterations and affords the ability to constantly learn from customers and evolve the end product.
Going beyond process
But it’s also important to understand truly innovative solutions don’t come directly from customer input. They come from understanding and solving the specific problems we observe.
As Henry Ford famously declared, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
Apple wouldn’t have invented the iPhone out of customer requests or recommendations. For this reason, how we frame our research matters just as much as the research itself. And we employ many techniques to articulate the problem.
These processes alone will not result in great creative output. The processes themselves don’t create a connection, there’s something else more critical at play here.
The neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, discovered that rational decision-making relies on emotional inputs.
Through studying subjects with damage to their emotional brain function, Damasio noticed that people were able to articulate their thought processes through decisions with great clarity. They seemed to be lucid thinkers and were even able to discuss highly traumatic experiences with no emotional charge.
You would guess with that type of clarity these people would be high-functioning, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, they couldn’t hold menial jobs and were barely scraping by. While they had the ability to clearly articulate thoughts, they couldn’t make decisions. They would fumble back and forth on decisions and never commit.
It’s a huge finding that demonstrates our emotional connection is key to decision-making. Bringing this back to our customers, we might be able to rationalize what’s best for them based on research results, but if we’re not experiencing the pain they feel or the rewards they gain, we can only hope to get lucky in our decisions.
I find that there is a tendency to focus attention on future experiences through prototype testing while skipping the understanding of current state experiences. When we do that, we don’t build that emotional connection with where our customer or client is at.
The famed architect Louis Kahn learned this lesson the hard way. One of his best-known buildings the Richards Medical Research Laboratories was received in architectural circles with high regard for its innovative open structure. It showed architects and engineers new possibilities for designing spaces, but there was a big problem — the scientists that worked there hated it!
The labs were flooded with sunlight and the occupants taped aluminum foil to the windows to reflect the light and keep the labs from getting too hot. Scientists aren’t the most social group of people and they like their private reflective spaces that were eliminated in this building.
When Louis Kahn noticed the aluminum foil along all the windows, he knew he made a mistake. That led to his later works like the Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, TX where instead of flooding the space with natural light, it enters through slits in the ceiling structure and is reflected towards the internal structure creating a beautiful glow. The spaces are bright and reflective while sheltering visitors from the blazing Texas sun.
Louis Kahn’s internalization of the scientists’ pain led to arguably some of the best works of architecture in the 20th century.
The best creative professionals I’ve worked with tend to be acutely sensitive in that they pick up on the slightest emotional shifts around them. When that sensitivity is channeled toward their audience, amazing work often follows.
Originally published on Boundless Canvas on March 2, 2023.
