User first

This is a tough one. You know what you want. You know who your users are. You know what your users want. I know what you want and what the user wants. All wrong. We don’t know shit. Not about ourselves, not about each other and most definitely not about the users.

Best we can do is take guesses – or actually ask them. User studies FTW! While this is a huge step for many customers, as user studies can be time consuming, expensive, complex and might have uncertain outcome, it might be exactly what you need. There are many possible options for this, too many to draw them here but if you’re interested, we’ll figure something out – I’ve been studying this for some years.

But even if you understandably decline to take the risk and conduct a user study, it’s either way crucial to always design with the users in mind. And that’s what I do. Even if this sometimes means to dismiss brilliant ideas or elements we really like. Designing for the users sometimes hurts.