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The oldest file on my laptop is a Word document named: Clients say the darndest things. This document includes interesting things clients have said over the past decade. Don’t get me wrong, I love my clients, I really do. But one of the main reasons I am on client projects as a user experience strategist is to ensure they don’t lose focus of their end users. Which brings me to my favorite category of interesting things clients have said: “Let’s make it like…” –  as in “Let’s make our search like Google”, “Let’s make our homepage like Yahoo!”, “Let’s make our news pages like CNN”,  and the most repeated, “I use <favorite website name goes here> all the time and I like it, so let’s make our site like theirs”.

The first few times I faced these types of situations, I would cringe and brace myself for what lay ahead, until I got a “Know Thy User” t-shirt.  I now keep this t-shirt handy for meetings to remind everyone of the first commandment of UX: “Know Thy User” and to remind them to focus on the actual end users.

We are Not The User

As much as we would like to think that our users are like us, they are not. Anyone involved in the creation of an interactive experience, be it a site, system, or an app, is not a typical user – and that includes all the business stakeholders, designers, and developers.

Since all users are not identical, we segment similar users into groups and then identify the key user groups. User interviews and contextual inquiries are research techniques that help us understand actual users, along with their needs, expectations and goals.

Meet the Actual Users

To make it easier to design for these end users, we condense our findings into user requirements and personas. Think of user requirements as the user equivalent of business requirements. Personas are short profiles of representative users from the key user groups. Give them a name, and put a face to that name, and you get to meet “John the tech enthusiast” or “Susan the soccer mom”. These personas make it easier for everyone to visualize the actual end users of the system. We’ve found it helpful to put up posters of personas to remind us of who we are ultimately catering to, during all stages of the project –from defining requirements through design and development.

When prioritizing new features and enhancements, the deciding factor is no longer subjective or based on personal preferences and likes of stakeholders, but focused on the user: “Will this new feature entice John to try our new product?” or “Will this make it easier for Susan to select our product over others?”. John and Susan also serve as constant reminders to designers who try to create “bleeding edge” designs (“Would John find this interface intuitive?”), and to developers tempted to incorporate the latest technology (“Will Susan’s computer support this new technology?”). In time, John and Susan become entrenched in the project, helping us build for them, not us, resulting in a solution that is useful, usable and meets their needs.

And yes, there are times I wear my t-shirt, look in the mirror, and remind myself: I am not the user.

Created for a webinar Watchfire (now part of IBM) invited me to conduct in June 2001, the presentation was based on an article I wrote for ClickZ in March 2001: “Creating a Hierarchy of User-Experience Needs” http://www.clickz.com/839221