Designing for people
How people use what you build, and how to design for what they came to do.
Reflections on thirty years in tech: as a writer, a designer, a developer and a user.
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Zoom out: here is service design
Service design asks you to look at everything around the screen: the letter before it, the counter beside it, the helpdesk after it. It is a good way of looking and a poor way of building.
In February 2021 my assignment, at a large IT organisation in the public sector, was to explain service design to everyone: project managers, designers, developers, business analysts, HR. Four hours on a video call, in…
Designing for people
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Stay where you are
Stay on the page. Do the task where the task is. Every extra screen, every link to elsewhere, is a moment where someone stops doing what they came to do.
If there is one rule I have applied to almost every interface I worked on, it is this one: stay on the page. Do not spread over two or three screens what fits on one. Do not send someone to a help page, an FAQ or a…
Designing for people
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An FAQ is a list of problems you did not fix
Every question on a page of frequently asked questions is a problem somewhere else on the site. The page explains it. It rarely fixes it.
Most websites I have reviewed in my career had one: a page headed Frequently asked questions, somewhere near the bottom of the menu, with twenty or forty questions on it. Some were questions nobody had ever asked. Many…
Designing for people
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Top Tasks: what people came to do
Most visitors come for one of five things to your website. How to find out which five?
Ask an organisation what belongs on its website and you get everything: the history, the values, the press releases, the new logo, the department that felt overlooked last time. Ask a visitor and you get one thing. What…
Designing for people
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The interruption you cannot turn off
Pop-ups were beaten once. They came back as part of the page
You follow a link because you want to read one paragraph. The page arrives, and before you reach it: a box about cookies. Behind it, a box offering ten per cent off. In the corner, a request to send you notifications…
Designing for people
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Inside-out design
Services built from the organisation’s logic instead of the visitor’s
Some time ago I had to register a small rental property with the regional authorities. A legitimate obligation, a modest formality, and on paper a matter of an afternoon. It took considerably longer, and along the way…
Designing for people