Designed for Use

Listen to Your Users

It’s important to keep in mind that you are not your users. At most, you are one of your users; one user typically constitutes a minority of all users. You may think that a new feature sounds extremely useful, but chances are that many of your users disagree. This disconnect is sometimes called the internal-audience problem: the people who design and implement solutions do so for people who are like them, rather than for people who are like their actual customers.

You know too much about how your product works and too little about how people use it. Your users, on the other hand, know a lot about how they use your product but very little about how it works.

It’s often tempting to add what amounts to useless complexity. You ...