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INNOVATING DESIGN PRACTICE

Useful information to have about users and their activities when starting to design a feature.

When designers work in an embedded environment, attached to a full-stack team, there is time and support to gain knowledge about the domain, its users, and their processes. In contrast, in a studio environment designers work with a number of teams across products or features. Due to this, often in a studio environment, (and sometimes in an embedded one) designers are approached to create an experience for something they are not intimately knowledgable about.

Adding to concepts that Feature Lists Don’t Cut It addressed, the following are some of the kinds of information that will help designers strategize and prioritize trade-offs, and make a great design easier to create:

You may have heard of user personas but are wondering how they get used. Knowing details about the user persona helps UX prioritize things like efficiency vs learnability (we would like to do both but there are always trade-offs). Other user background information that affects design trade-offs include those related to educational level, knowledge of the subject or business, how often the user is likely to use feature/product, etc…

The list goes on, but to understand how user persona information gets used let's look at a few…

Educational Level — used when selecting labels, naming elements, and writing instruction text or question/answer experiences to provide language and sentence structure appropriate to the user population’s reading level.

Knowledge of the subject or business — used to decide how detailed instructions should be, whether abbreviations can be used, whether to use industry language or find more common descriptions.

How often the user is likely to use feature — used to determine whether the user will need support each time they use the feature or can be expected to have used it enough to remember how it works. For instance…

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