Reality Is Our Friend…

To design a successful product, you have to start with your user’s wants and needs. We in UX know this, and our stakeholders will agree with us — in theory. But when theory meets reality it can be difficult to get product planners, designers and engineers to commit to tasks other than creating feature sets, screen designs or code. After all, who doesn’t think they respond to customer needs?

It’s easy to fall into this trap and take shortcuts, at the expense of our users. So how can we get our non-UX colleagues to question their assumptions and make users the final arbiter of design decisions? What works for me, is this simple phrase:

“Reality is our friend, and reality is out there.”

A sentiment that cuts through the noise

This phrase came to me one day in mid-1990s while I was sitting in a room with over two dozen engineers and managers. We were there to spend two weeks defining requirements for a new billing system for our customer contact reps. It didn’t take long to realize that most of the people who were saying what customer contact reps “wanted” had never met a rep, much less done any customer contact work.

“The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don’t even know you are making.”

- Douglas Adams

I piped up. “Reality is our friend,” I offered. “And reality is out there.” I had to explain what I meant by “reality,” of course: any information, convention or policy that’s relevant to the design of the product, system or service under development. But once I did, everyone was receptive to the sentiment. It led them back to where we should have started: with the user. Instead of guessing at what our users wanted, we started talking about how to include actual users in our requirements definition work. So our user requirements would become requirements from… actual users.

Keeping it “real” and Design Thinking

“Reality” is about facts, not guesses or opinions. Our decisions should be made based on facts that come from users. And users are usually out in the world, not the engineering or marketing groups.

This simple phrase has turned out to be invaluable for just about every project I’ve worked on since.

• It encapsulates a large chunk of Design Thinking into a package I’ve found most clients and stakeholders understand. Even when they don’t get it right away, people usually respond with the question, “What do you mean by that?”, creating a teachable moment.
• I also use this phrase as a personal compass. When I’m not sure which direction I should go on a design I ask myself, “What is the reality here? Who should I talk to (or observe) to provide missing details?”

I encourage us all to see if by making reality our friend we can more easily help our coworkers create products people love.