This Is Not For You
The joy and challenge of designing for people who are very different from us
The people I work with are unusual, for a number of reasons. To name a few: We doodle together on Wednesday afternoons with Sharpies on neatly cut squares of card stock. We enjoy getting together with our families for “hootenannies,” to sing and play musical instruments, regardless of skill or the ability to stay in key. We’ve been an independent design company since 1992, and we’ve intentionally stayed small. And we like building apps for people who are nothing like us.
On this latter point, we may diverge from many of our fellow designers. These days, it’s trendy to spin up fantasy redesigns of our own favorite brands. It’s a fun exercise, for sure, to think about how we’d like to make an app that we use every day better. It’s necessarily easy to get in the mind of the typical user, because we are that typical user.
But our team at Journey Group likes to do the opposite: We love making niche apps that are super-powerful and super-tailored for a discrete group of people. Often, these people look and act and think nothing like our team. Sometimes the app is for hundreds of top-tier researchers across a leading public university. Sometimes it’s for two people in Minnesota who are helping pastors find new jobs. In either case, we ourselves would never have the occasion to use these tools. And it’s precisely because of this vast difference between the users and ourselves that we relish the challenge of creating such apps.
In our industry, we’ve known for decades about the false-consensus effect — often represented by the phrase You are not the user — but it is one thing to preach and another to practice. As humans, we believe by default that most people — the good, rational, and tasteful ones, of course! — share our own preferences and behaviors. We strategize and design and develop out of this cognitive bias. It takes discipline to train ourselves to see without these instinctive blindspots.
“Artifacts that are right for us are not necessarily right for our users: we can’t judge user-interface quality based on whether we like a design ourselves. We need to learn how to create systems that are right for those who will actually use them.”
— Dr. Raluca Budiu, writing for the Nielsen Norman Group
As we continue to battle our own entrenched biases, here are a few things our team has learned about building apps for disparate and distinct audiences.
5 ways to design for people who are different from you
1. Practice the art of forensic listening.
The lost art of listening has been widely lamented. We’re surrounded by noise, both on screens and in real life. It takes focus and concentration to listen well today. Knowing this, as we begin an engagement with clients, we want to practice forensic listening.
What we mean by forensic listening is paying attention to our clients while applying our collective knowledge to the problems we hear. It’s listening — but listening with an active wisdom. Clients can tell us about their struggles and what issues they want a new app to solve, but they often see through a glass darkly. And that’s natural; clients are often too close to the problems. When we’re doing our jobs as designers, we are guides through the fog. We listen closely, and then we clear the way.
Forensic listening brings our team’s expertise to bear on what we hear. We distill what we’ve heard into a road map. By practicing this kind of listening, we in turn strip ourselves of our self-focused bias. We have to step into the role of dispassionate guides, unclouded by our own preferences but oriented by our expertise. We listen, and then we blaze the trail.
2. Ensure we’re solving the right problem.
Forensic listening leads us to a healthy sense of caution. Specifically, we are careful to identify and solve the right problems: not the problems we want to solve, and sometimes not even the problems that are initially identified by the client.
We are careful to avoid proposing easy or common solutions to the issues we hear. For example, what worked for one client from the same public university may not work for another. Even within the same organization, needs can be vastly different from project to project.
As my colleague Jeremy Cherry has written, “I’ve come to learn that the value a designer brings isn’t aesthetic or even strategic: We bring the value of designation. It’s where our title comes from. Helping our client make critical decisions about what they are trying to achieve with their product is our key role.”
So, how do we know when it’s the right problem? There isn’t a tidy formula, of course. (If there were, there would be no need for designers.) The best rule of thumb we’ve found is that the problem to target is the one that has risen to the surface, time and time again, after our exercise in forensic listening. It’s the problem that lies at the heart of the strategy of the app or service or tool that we’re building. It’s the problem that could make all the difference for this client if approached with wise design thinking.
3. Know when to apply gentle pressure.
As designers, we’ve been hired because we have expertise in an area that our clients don’t.
The hard work is knowing when it’s right to push back and when it’s right to yield. This is true of any healthy relationship, whether it’s a friend, partner, or client. Balance is essential. In the context of the client relationship, this nimble dance of give-and-take is a necessary skill for designers of tailor-made apps and digital services. And yet, because of the relatively short timeline of a client engagement (compared with, say, decades of marriage), trust has to grow and evolve rather rapidly.
Trading on this trust, how do app designers know when it’s appropriate to push back against a client’s requests? For our team, we always go back to the strategy. And strategy is always informed by the people. Who is this for? What do they need? How can we best serve them with this interface or menu or microcopy?
When the people we can’t see, the people who are ultimately using what we make, are affected, it’s often worth it to push back or find new common ground with our clients. We return to our shared strategic goals, reminding each other whom we’re ultimately designing for. This is often some of the most difficult and labor-intensive work, but we enjoy this kind of dancing.
4. Reject trendiness; favor elegance.
So often we designers have to resist the urge to make things sexy. Resisting this temptation is particularly important when we’re designing for people who are unlike us. More often than not, our tastes differ from the end user’s. What shouldn’t change is the elegance of our solution.
Regardless of the design trends of the moment, we want to build digital tools that are functional and sophisticated. The underlying architecture and the exposed interface must both be sustainable and clear, regardless of the user’s identity, background, or preferences. We endeavor to design tools that will weather the volatile landscape of the web. And this often means that we may not choose the most fashionable solution. Instead, we pursue design that serves others well and sustains its core functionality over time.
5. Have the humility to revise.
Finally, we have to stay humble. It’s imperative that we as designers have the humility to admit when we need to reconsider. We have to embody that seemingly paradoxical and yet vital posture of being experts—but experts who can admit they’re wrong.
The solutions that are intuitive to us often aren’t to the majority of users. When we get user feedback that the microcopy was confusing, we should listen — even if we think that the button text is crystal clear. When we hear that people can’t find the login button, even though we put it up there in bright blue and block letters, we should take that complaint seriously.
Ultimately, we must operate with graciousness and humility as designers, information architects, content strategists, and developers. Without being too sentimental, we love the work that we do. And we find it to be a privilege to serve people who are profoundly different from us through web design. Like most privileges, we want to think well about it — and then design accordingly.
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