Designing for one person
I was talking with John about his assistive technologies work @ ITP, where him and his students create devices to assist those undergoing rehabilitation/occupational therapy.
He mentioned that his favorite method has always been to spend lots of time with the specific person who they are making the device for and really get into their world.
This bypasses a lot of other typical design methods with focus groups, surveys and other ways of gathering large amounts of data. John figures that if what they are creating doesn’t work for the person they’ve spent all this time with, odds are there are serious issues. Similarly, if the product works, then it’s likely it can be adapted to serve many other people.
That made me think of the way Taylor and I approach designing and building Hype Machine. We go by the things that would work for us as a start and then tweak them for a larger audience. We know that we don’t use the web like everyone else but our very basic responses to design decisions are often the best and clearest guide we can get.
I notice this about many good web apps I use: it’s clear that the development and design came from someone’s personal desire and vision of how something should work to be satisfying.
We need more of this.
