What people think and do

Textile 2024 week 11 note

Users. Participants. People. The fact is that you always have to be thinking about them when you’re designing and building software. How to understand what potential users might be thinking is key to building software. Everyone knows this. There’s many ways into people’s thoughts, but the key is coming in at them from a lot of angles. I’ve spent the past week looking at and designing surveys, and even more time looking for how we can get the right participants to be asking things. I’ve also spent a lot of time pouring over analytics, that is the numbers that show what your users are doing. How many people are clicking what? Which thing are they not doing that you thought they would? What are they not even seeing or likely not understanding? Both of these are things that one typically doesn’t think of a designer doing, but I think it’s key. To design you have to have something for someone to design for, and you have to have and use all the available tools in your belt to try to do that.