Who Do You Design For?
Who do you design for? And what do you want them to achieve?
I've ask myself those questions all the time, throughout the various stages and roles of my career. And for anything that I’m intentionally building.
As an engineer:
Who am I designing this feature for? What do I want them to be able to do?
As a hackathon attendee:
Who is this hack for? What’s the purpose?
As an event organiser:
What should the attendees be doing right now? How do we make that more efficient and easier?
As a blogger:
Who is my reader? What’s their starting point? What should they know by the end of this blog post?
As an engineering manager:
Who is this process/feedback/information for? What do the developers on my team need right now? How do we help them?
As a conference speaker:
Who is my target audience? What do I want them to takeaway from my talk?
As a workshop designer:
What do my participants already know? What do they need to learn? How do I help them learn that effectively?
As a freelancer:
Who is my ideal client? What problems are they trying to solve?
Asking those questions and understanding who and what you’re designing is key to creating good experiences. Whether that experience is a new product, an event, a process, or any of the other examples I gave, it needs to be deliberately designed to do its job.
Learn to ask yourself these questions whenever you’re building or sharing something. Even with things that you might not have thought of.
What examples do you have that fit the above? What things do you do?
Engineer Your Talks: Brainstorming Talk Ideas Workshop
Next workshop: September 30th 17:00-19:00 UK
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