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As a performer of creative art, it is of vital importance to develop your own craft of design - a visual aesthetic that defines what you create and your creative abilities. Whether you call them your skills, talent, or style - develop it and own it. The inner monologue that you use to evaluate how good, beautiful, or logical an idea is - becomes the mysterious thing that makes what you create truly yours. It is a personal battle to create something better than your previous creative effort created. Those kinds of acts always possess a degree of unknown magic, that magical thinking.

Regardless of your education, experience, how hard you plan or strategize - anything seen as a perfect creative product requires a messy and imperfect path of multiple concepts, iterations, and trial & error to come and life. That process and those series of steps you take are the processes of developing something out of nothing. By embracing our abilities, while giving ourselves over to where the idea is taking us, accepting the fact that things won't turn out how we originally envisioned them - we bear the fruit of creativity which takes us where we need to go.

We're supposed to make a plan and work the plan. If the plan does not work, it is completely okay to change it - but always have a plan to start from. By sticking with the process and understanding the output, giving the things we did not expect the room to breathe, we end up with final products which more often than not tend to exceed our initial visions and expectations.

Ultimately, optimizing your performance as a designer is about choosing what and how to think and then acting upon it with passion and commitment. The more productive and optimistic your mindset is, the more your creative health and stamina will be. When it comes to design, you must be a long-distance runner. As a creator, you have to strengthen your creative muscles and this will require exercise, pain, and repetition. This is an unavoidable part of growth and becoming better.





Performance Optimization as a Designer

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### **We are not the user**

What we often do is assume, without realizing it, that our users think as we think and like what we like. What we get is generalizing based on our own experience, which is actually a cognitive bias called the *availability bias*.

Designers need to go against this bias by interacting with their users as much as possible.

### **Users don't always tell the truth**

Only talking to our users does not automatically yield useful insights, and very often it can actually lead us in the wrong direction. Users don’t purposely lie to us, but *things people say* are different from *things people actually do*.

It takes the designer's skills to make them reveal their actual needs and behaviors. Without them, the user research becomes useless at best and misleading at worst.

### **Make the problem clear**

If done right, User Research is the strongest foundation for everything that follows. Having a deep and reliable understanding of our users and their problems can empower a team and lead it in the right direction like no other thing.

Decisions become easy because we no longer have to guess. With this knowledge, we are able to create products orders of magnitude better and save ourselves great amounts of time by avoiding rework.

# **So, how do we conduct the proper user research?**

### **Define your Research Objectives**

What is it exactly that we're trying to learn? Write down your research objectives before doing anything else. We usually aim for 3 to 7 objectives per project. Examples of what we are trying to learn are:

*   **Goals or motivation** - what are our users goals?

*   **Behavior** - what kind of actions does our user typically take, and in what order?

*   **Knowledge** - which common knowledge for our design does the user posses?

*   **Situations** - what kind of situations is our target audience often in?

*   **Decision-making process** - how does our user evaluate and act in our environment?

We want to understand our actual users, but also need to understand their ecosystem. Interview users with a different range of experiences and backgrounds. In some cases, you might also want to interview non-users that have a supporting role in order to understand the issue at hand on a deeper level. Let's say you were to do user research for an e-commerce website, you'd start it with interviewing people with different shopping habits (one-time buyers, regular buyers, company accounts, …), people using the competition, customer support, etc.

### **Ask for your users' stories.**

There is no better way of gaining information from your users. When your interviewees tell you stories about their experiences - they will also parallelly be answering many of your questions at once. Open-ended questions are the way to go about it - giving your user the chance and space to fully express what they feel.

### **Try to stay away from opinions**

Never ask your users what they want. Designers are not the user, and the users are not designers. Do not talk about your idea - in doing so we only skew the data as it is in our nature to twist the narrative in order to tell you what you want to hear.

### **Summarizing things**

Take as many notes as possible. Making sure to write all the feedback that you get from your interview is very important, as our findings will be backed up and based on it. After completing the research, start looking for patterns. After identifying them, the next step is to create systems that will help your team build the best product or service. Those can be user personas, customer profiles, experience maps, behavior patterns, strategy canvas, and so on. Remember that everything we build and create is for our users sake, as such, we should communicate to them as much as possible in order to get the clearest understanding of their requires & needs.





Conducting User Research, and why it is so important

Accessibility remains one of the most important topics across multiple industries, yet mental health & anxiety, don’t often come to mind as a piece of the puzzle.

As designers, we need to ask ourselves - what mental health hurdles may be unintentional consequences of our work?

Even though our world is becoming significantly digital, we need to think of how difficult certain digital forms can be in terms of accessibility. Certain health conditions & disabilities and their side effects, such as insomnia, headaches, fatigue, etc. come in many forms and make the digital world difficult for the user.

The first step would be to make sure to distinguish between a technical glitch and human error. Without proper messaging to explain the cause and the next steps, some may be completely lost - continuing to beat themselves up for thinking they made a mistake. And if it is a human error, make sure to nicely communicate it to them on how to fix it, or better yet to see what we could do to prevent it in the first place.

Look at it this way - is there any chance for our users to remember every account they've ever created, especially with all the different password requirements? Adding on top of that platforms which we use maybe once or twice a year, or somewhere we create an account in the middle of another longer form - or ones created for us by our employers and such?

### **So, what can we do about it?**

It is very easy for us as designers to make decisions based on how we and our teams typically interact with products, especially in the digital sphere. But when we do so, we further alienate from those who are not so familiar with or anxious around technology. So what we end up doing is, instead of bringing technology closer to them - we push it away.

We need to put a lot of things about our users into consideration. What platforms are they familiar with, what level of education do they have around our products and services, what issues from their lives could be straining their "user" state?

Having all this in mind, one could argue that there are infinite items to consider when designing, so let us start off with just a few:

*   Separate the human error from the technical glitch - making sure to respond to each with high clarity.

*   Tell the user that sometimes, it is not on them - it is on us.

*   Have instances where you explain your products the same way you'd explain them to a five-year-old.

*   Do not leave steps of your interface where you do not offer guidance.

*   Make the effects of actions by your users' side crystal clear, and give them the option to undo them too.

*   Never design elements with any intrusive factors attached to them.

Paying attention to details such as those, helps us produce user experiences of higher qualities. Good experiences will make their good days better, while bad experiences tend to make those bad days even worse. Even the smallest straws can sometimes break the camel's back - so let us try design experiences and products which are going to help lift the weight of our users.





Blog

Performance Optimization as a Designer

Conducting User Research, and why it is so important

Designing Inclusive User Experiences