Designing for Real People, Not "Users"
When I first started learning about experience design, whether for websites, learning platforms, or digital products, the word that came up most was “user.” Everything was for the user. Every decision was framed by what the user might do. Every research method focused on user behavior.
But here’s the thing: nobody self-identifies as a “user.” No one wakes up and thinks, today I’ll be a user of things. They wake up as parents trying to balance school drop-offs with work emails. They wake up as someone who doesn’t speak English as a first language, struggling through an overly technical help doc. They wake up tired, distracted, late, excited, confused, curious. They are not abstractions or personas or funnel stages. They’re people.
The best design work starts by remembering this. It resists the temptation to flatten complexity into numbers on a chart. It holds space for real life: the messy, variable, deeply human experience of trying to make sense of information on a screen.
I’ve learned that the projects that succeed most are the ones that allow for this variability. The ones that offer multiple ways in. The ones that assume no one reads carefully the first time. The ones that are flexible enough to meet people where they are, instead of forcing them to fit a “journey” we mapped out in a workshop six months ago.
And maybe most importantly, the work that resonates doesn’t start with features or objectives or KPIs. It starts with empathy. It starts by asking what it feels like to be on the other side of the screen.
The irony is that this human-centered approach usually leads to better performance data, too. People stay longer. They click more. They finish the course or sign up for the newsletter or schedule the consultation. But that’s not the reason to design this way. The reason is because it’s simply better. More honest. More thoughtful. More respectful.
Every time I get stuck trying to make a piece of writing or a design decision work, I try to step back and remember: this isn’t for “users.” It’s for people. And that makes all the difference.
