Design for the People

Rick Monro
Head of Design, Tibus

Developing an online application that automates a particular task for your customers or clients carries with it an element of risk. The transactions you would normally have full control over are now in the hands of a software interface.

When your customers access your website or app, they become a ‘user’ of that application. The interactions they have online will diverge markedly from the contacts they have with you in the physical world. The expectations they have in this user role will change – and you must be able to meet them.

User expectations

You will know from your own experience of using websites that you reasonably assume that the site’s designers had you in mind when they built the site – after all you are an average user, right? You simply expect to be able to easily complete your tasks and move on. This is exactly the viewpoint your customers will have when they visit your site. And with expectations at that level, you must be able to deliver.

The bigger your brand or the better your reputation, the higher the stakes will be. If customers have had great offline experiences, the more they will expect to have that matched online.

Judged in this light, the interface that represents your business is every bit as important as your best sales representatives, client executives or spokespersons.

Know your customers

Happily, User Interface design need not be a game of chance. There are tried and trusted methodologies that ensure the best possible chances of success for your project in the form of Customer Focused Design. In short this is ensuring that every decision taken during the design process is in the interests of the user.

As with so many best practice principles it sounds almost inanely simple. However, achieving effective simplicity takes work. This approach to design demands that you know:

• who your customers are (and there will be a number of different types), and
• what each customer wants (i.e. why they are using your application)

You will know your business best, and your designers should be asking questions, researching and gathering data on all of the relevant aspects of your operations that are being taken online.

The designer’s challenge

The designer’s job is then to specify what the user needs in order to get what they want, and this is where their expertise will come to the fore, by:

• using personas and scenarios to identify your key audiences and user groups
• wireframing user journeys to iteratively test how personas can be matched to cohesive user journeys
• ensuring that the application or site is forgiving to user error and facilitates user goals

If they can’t use it, you lose it!

User interfaces are a bridge between your products, services, content and your users – in other words, real people. We make fantastic use of technology and build unbelievably clever systems that would have been unimaginable a few short years ago. But unless real people can access them and use them successfully, they are digital follies.

So let’s dispense the impersonal industry speak: user-focussed design is people-focussed design, pure and simple.