Don’t Design for Yourself, Design for Your Audience

Design is very subjective and as such the design process is often one of the trickiest, and most time consuming, parts of a project. Everyone has an opinion and this varies from person to person, so when there are multiple stakeholders with varying viewpoints it can be tough to find something that everyone loves.

Strong foundations

Design often works best when you’re given a good brief or starting point to work from. There should be enough breathing space in the brief for the designer to go off and put their own touch on it (that’s why you’ve hired them, after all) but getting some basic ideas down about how you want the end product to look is always helpful.

Design for your users

It’s important to remember that the end design should be led by what the site’s users are going to like and find useful. Of course, the design should be liked by the stakeholders and the project team, but it’s often good to remember that, while there are various opinions around the table, it’s the end user who is most important and the design should be led by this.

Show it around

To make sure your design works for your users, find people who fit within your target audience and talk to them about what they do and don’t like. If you have designs that you’ve created, show them to the potential users and get feedback. We advise clients to get as much feedback as possible from people who aren’t closely associated with the project. If you’re working on something on a day to day basis it’s very easy to have a biased opinion when it comes to the creative process which is likely to detract from the suitability of the end result.

Of course you should love it, but make sure your audience will love it just as much, then you know it’s going to be something that will work in the long-term.