Design Usability: Is There Such a Thing as an Average User?
:: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 ::
A usability/user centered design topic blog post caught my attention and I thought it would be fun to investigate the many points it brings up. The post is called:
What pinged my brain was the very idea of designing for an average user. The article is written for IT folks and those who design web software. It's been my experience that inexperienced software designers design for an average end user (ie. no real requirements, they believe the average user knows how to do everything), while experienced ones who work with QA people, marketing people and project managers design for target markets.
In that way, they understand better who will be using the software and can design accordingly. If teenagers will not be using the medical office software, this is a good thing to keep in mind while programming and planning paths, modules, execution of application, etc. If nurses and receptionists will be the main target user, how old are they, are they more likely to wear glasses and how technical do they tend to be? (They may be VERY technically oriented, but not in the ways a software designer may understand them to be.) If Doctors use it, they have about 3 seconds of available time to fiddle with it.
The same process occurs with SEO/M. The better SEO's have knowledge of search user behavior, and apply that in their work for clients. Marketing data is collected on how people respond to keywords or where a site seems to dump off visitors. This information helps determine design strategies. It's not information to be ignored, nor is it wise for any site owner to think in terms of an "average user" when attempting to market their site to engines and people.
The article defines an "average user". In doing so, it raises good points about things many of us likely don't remember to consider. But again, I couldn't find an average person in the pile. All I could see were specific targets to seriously define requirements for, so their needs are met.
However, even doing that isn't going to help save the end user who can't find the images on the hard drive once they finally learned how to get them there (using one example from the blog piece). They haven't lived in my house, where my IT-guy husband loves playing with the house network and is always moving files and folders on the shared drive. I never know where things are! It's a user behavior no sane software or hardware developer must have to think about.
The article links to resources and gives a perspective that is useful for helping web and software designers to constantly consider the end user and how they use, or in many ways, don't use things they find online because they can't figure out how to use it, never learned, or it is impossible to understand. I think there's more of those people than we like to think.
Each of them is a target market/reader/visitor/user who wants to know we thought about them when building the site/application. As pointed out in the post,
"Anything not apparent, transparent, obvious, intuitive and explained may be problematic. Anything requiring understanding is not intuitive. Intuitive means it does not require understanding."
Cre8asiteforums announces the Two New Moderators. They are popular members, well loved for their contributions to the Creative Community. So, we just teamed them up and made them official hosts of two popular areas in the Forums.
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