Stop Designing for Imaginary People
Embracing function and hospitality in real-world design
We’re all designing for real people. Of course we are.
But it’s easy to drown projects in our own jargon sometimes. In the world of web design, we can get wrapped up in users and personas and demographics and UX.
So, here’s an untrendy assertion:
The more we rely on archetypes, the further we get from serving the real human beings who are interacting with our work.
At Journey Group, we call people who interact with our work participants and visitors. Here, they’re not users and personas.
It may seem like a trivial distinction to make — of course we’re making stuff for humans; androids can’t read (yet) — but the right words matter. You may be thinking, That’s needlessly subtle. It doesn’t matter what we call them. Just make the stupid thing. We hear you, but we stand by this maxim: The words we use affect the way we work.
As designers, strategists, writers and developers, we choose our words carefully because it informs how we work and what we make.
By relying on constructed personas, perhaps built from an over-reliance on demographics data or even some unsupported assumptions, we separate ourselves from the flesh-and-blood human beings who will encounter what we make.
By thinking of people as “users,” mere operators of a product, we diminish the creative connection with a prospective participant.
Personas aren’t bad, per se. They can be helpful. But if we can move away from those manufactured profiles of “Linda,” mother of three who shops at Ann Taylor Loft and drives a station wagon, and “Daniel,” thirty-something bachelor who buys a lot of Patagonia gear even though he never goes hiking, we can start designing not for agency-created imaginary friends but for the human beings we know and love deeply.
Let’s get beyond the flimsy fictional people and design for the living, breathing ones.
So, how do we make that theoretical jump? We think about designing for real people in two ways.
1. Design for function
Whether it’s a cutting-edge app or a gorgeously redesigned website, our projects need to be useful and usable to real people.
It’s easy to get sucked into the trap of creating to impress our fellow designers with the latest bells and whistles. We want what we make to look fantastic, of course, but we can start to neglect participants if we focus too much on the pizzazz. (Say it all together now: We are not the user. Really. We’re not.)
Great design is functional, not flashy.
With a nod to William Morris, let’s make beautiful things that people can use. Ask your mom to test out your new app. She’ll tell you, in no uncertain terms, what doesn’t make sense to her. Share a site menu you redesigned with your neighbor. Ask him what catches his eye.
Human beings, not user personas, are drawn to functional design. So, let’s make websites and apps that are beautifully practical and artfully simple.
2. Design for hospitality
Good design does the hard work of community building.
We want people to feel like they belong. A thoughtfully constructed product makes a visitor feel invited into an experience. Visitors who encounter our work should feel native in the environment we’ve created, whether it’s something as tiny as a pull quote style or as comprehensive as a fully redesigned university website.
Pinpointing “hospitable design” is admittedly tricky. For instance, what makes a certain icon more welcoming than another? Do shades of blue make people feel more at home than splashes of orange?
Every project will have its own set of visitors, who will naturally bring all of their preferences and prejudices to an interaction. We can’t know every visitor’s personal predilections, of course, but personas can lure us into skating over individual differences, encouraging us to lean on assumptions and force all visitors into predefined (and admittedly arbitrary) categories.
Put the personas down. Instead, let us think about crafting websites and apps as if we were preparing to host a dinner party. We plan a specific menu, set out the wine and welcome friends into our home; we know what will make them feel honored and known. Personas don’t help us get closer to human connection; often, they distract us, dragging us further away from the audiences we want to serve.
Design and write and code with a laser-like focus on building human connection. We might actually have a shot at creating such a connection if we do.
As designers, producers, developers and writers, we are not creating for the void, for a faceless general public.
We want to make beautiful, functional and hospitable things for the complicated, messy humans that we love and live with. The more specific language we use about what we make, the more likely we are to forge those rare — and delightfully human — connections.
