Old school designer are obsessed with aesthetics. Yes, they are. Most of the time they’ll overlook basic details in the design process to sacrifice for the ‘looks’ and failed miserably in multiple levels: Display Control Compatibility, Visual Mapping, Affordances, which leads to a poorly design product. If they only could follow Don Norman’s in The Design of Everyday Things
Who pays the bill? We, the users. Having to deal with errors of performance and satisfaction, and all the stress attached to it. And, how business respond to it? They create visual signage to guide the customers in achieving their transactional goals.
First step to a good design –understanding the users
If you, as a designer, consider your objectives without even knowing who your users are, your result will be a BAD design. Also, don’t think that you understand your users because you paid a marketing research firm to provide you demographic statistics. Yes, demographics can be valuable to identify who your users are; but, they lack information on Why and How these people are using your design. Go, get out there. See with your eyes.
Basics —
You need to understand users goals, needs, behaviors, mental models, and motivations early in the design process. Gathering this information, cannot be collected by demographic research. It must be done by conducting sociographic, qualitative field studies.
But what if…
Simple design methods were used early and throughout the design process. Design methods which could have included:
Participant observation – A method of collecting rich sociographic data through observation and recording of real users.
Object-orientated task analysis – A method of mapping out goal-based persona tasks across multiple scenarios.
Participatory design – A method which brings allows users to quickly co-create concepts with the design team in the actual environment.
