you are not your target user
Today's Alertbox from Jakob Nielsen is a list of top 10 application design mistakes. Something from the intro caught my attention:
Of course, people don't want to hear me say that they need to test their UI. And they definitely don't want to hear that they have to actually move their precious butts to a customer location to watch real people do the work the application is supposed to support.
The general idea seems to be that real programmers can't be let out of their cages. My view is just the opposite: no one should be allowed to work on an application unless they've spent a day observing a few end users.
I have to provide a corollary to that: You are not your target user. You might be a user of your application, but if you're the developer of the application, you are probably not the target user.
This can be hard to remember when you're developing applications that are widely used, and when you are a user of your application. I'm not immune to this. I sometimes have difficulty separating out my Entourage wishlist from my data about Entourage because I live in that application all day every day. And while I might want Entourage to give me a pony, and I even have data saying that there are other Entourage users who also want a pony, I'm sorry to say that the pony-wanting Entourage users aren't our target users. (Sorry, guys.)
I had one of the program managers in my office yesterday, having a great talk about some possibilities for the future. He kept on saying 'some people want this ... ', and sometimes 'this is how I do it in our app'. I kept on asking him the same question: 'who is this user, and is that user one of our target users?' It was a point we kept on circling around. When you are talking about an app that is used by millions of people, it's trivial to find one guy who wants you to add any given feature. But how does that suggested feature impact our millions of other users, does it help them or hinder them? What is the opportunity cost of adding it? Does adding this help us towards our stated goals?
We can't be everything to everyone. Oftentimes, a particular user will have needs that are diametrically opposed to another user, and you've got to choose the direction that you're going. This means that someone is going to be unhappy with you, and that's a choice that you have to make. It should be a conscious decision, made by weighing the benefits. And one of the ways to make that conscious decision is to observe real users doing real tasks in their real-world setting. Don't make the mistake of observing yourself in your office or (although this is at least slightly better) observing the guy down the hall in his office. Get your precious butt out of your office and go observe your users for a few days.
Comments
- Anonymous
February 19, 2008
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
February 21, 2008
We describe our target users in terms of behaviours -- specifically, we use personas to describe our target users and their definitive behaviours. There is more than one group of target users. Sorry, but I can't tell you what those personas are, unless you want to come to work for MacBU (and we do have open positions ... ). :) Using Mail.app doesn't necessarily mean that you're not a potential Entourage user. It means that we have to convince you that Entourage better meets your needs than Mail/iCal/Address Book.