If You’re Designing for Yourself, You’re Doing it Wrong

Design isn’t one size fits all.

Treat UX design like a dinner party. Your favorite dish to create is a super spicy chicken pasta. While perfect for you, making it exactly to your taste would be troublesome for your vegetarian guests and the ones whose sensitive stomachs can’t handle the spiciness. You decide to have the chicken on the side and fix the dish less spicy, but have hot sauce available. Good design is giving options within known conventions.

While we might create a product filling one of our own needs or desires, the user is not us. It’s dangerous to assume that every user will have the same intentions for an interaction. Recently checking Instagram, I came across some inappropriate material I wanted to report. Appalled that it took seven steps to report an account, I complained to my boyfriend about the poor UX. My mistake was assuming all users have the same good intentions and knowledge of Instagram guidelines that I do. In this case, the interface purposely makes reporting a bit challenging to reduce false reports. This is actually good design because it accounts for different user intentions.

Originally, I just gave advice on how to make hips appear smaller because that is always my goal. Considering many people wish they had larger hips, it makes more sense to explain how to achieve either result.

Designing the other day, I took advice from Design for Real Life* by Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher. They say, “there’s real value in taking that idealized user, and then imagining someone who breaks its mold -who is different in every single way.” For fun, I’ve been designing a photo posing app, using people similar to myself as the target audience. However, when I imagined a user with different goals, my design changed. For example, while I like advice on how to minimize hips, many women want to know how to look more curvaceous. Not all people consider beauty the same way and assuming they did would isolate a lot of users.

From the Twitter of Eric A. Meyer

Along with designing for ourselves, we often make the mistake of designing for our perfect user. Ideally we hope for users who are happy, have plenty of time, and are energetic. In reality, they are sometimes upset, rushed, and suffering from decision fatigue. In Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer shares his experience in 2014 when Facebook’s Year in Review popped up on his timeline, featuring a photo of his recently deceased six-year-old daughter. He explains, “The dissonance between that profound personal tragedy and the party images created a visceral moment of shock. The copy, ‘Here’s what your year looked like!’ added its own surreal layer of horror.”

Realizing not everybody may have had an amazing year, Facebook now uses the more neutral text, “Here’s my [year] Year in Review. See yours at facebook.com/yearinreview.” It’s not just about designing for the masses, but about taking into account how design changes focused on people’s varying needs often benefit all. People vary in circumstances, moods, and personalities, and rarely fit into our perfect user mold. Remember when designing the advice Dana Chisnel gives, “If you want your users to fall in love with your design, fall in love with your users.” Who are you designing for?

If anybody has a dribbble invite, I’m looking for one here.

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