Who, what, and why? Design for your target audience

Designers have a massive responsibility to be the advocates of product users. To be the voice of users and be a balancing force between Business and user needs can be challenging, Design can influence brand perception and create real impact for a product. Non-designers often ask me — what is the role of user research-led design? I always reply that it is a two-sided coin according to me. It does not just include look, feel, and stylish UI but also functionality, utility, and creating value.

People ignore design that ignores people. — Frank Chimero (Author, The Shape of Design)

Your beautiful-looking design will fail if the users can’t use it or get lost in the navigation or can’t get proper support while using the product. That is why before starting any project, you have to start with the end in mind. Who are you going to talk to? Who are they? What do they like? What are they looking for? What are you going to offer that others have failed to offer? Let’s dwell deeper into how to narrow down your target audience, identify pain points and create need-based solutions.

Identifying Users

Great design begins with an understanding of who it’s for. Understanding user needs is vital to make informed and evidence-based decisions during the actual design process.

To be a better human is to understand not only those around you but also yourself. How do you engage and relate to others? How can you get more out of your friendships and relationships by recognizing your own behaviour? — Matti Hicks (UX Researcher)

Let’s start with demographics — age, gender, location, house income, occupation, etc. — this will help you profile your users and narrow down your reach. Then comes Psychographics — the finer details of their behavioral traits — Who are they? What drives them? What are their beliefs and values? What products do they use? What is their lifestyle like? Psychographic profiles identify the “what” and “why” details of a persona. Ultimately, these points of differentiation determine why people buy the things they do and prefer one brand/product over another. As detailed as your research is, you will be able to drill down effective differentiators for your product that will influence your users to choose you over your competitors.

Pain Points — Wants and Needs

Likely, someone has already solved what you’re trying to solve. Then why will the users choose you over these existing solutions? If you look closely and your research is on point, you will notice that there are pain points that the competitors have not addressed — you have to address these areas and work on them first. This is what will give your product an edge and an entry into an existing market.

The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable. — Blake Ross (Co-creator of Mozilla Fire)

Put aside personal preferences: Good design plays a vital role here in addressing user pain points and highlighting these solutions in a usable manner. Need — what are the inherent needs of the users that haven’t been addressed yet? One of the methods that I use and have used in the past is the Another Lens research toolkit by Airbnb Design. To have an unbiased perspective of what are the user needs, we as designers must keep our biases aside and step into the shoes of our users.

You may want to try out the latest cutting-edge trends but is that what appeals to the users? Is that what your research suggests? Is that what will appeal to them? As a designer, it’s your responsibility to ensure user-centric conversations keep the end goal aligned, enhancing the users’ experience and is a perfect fit for the target audience.

Generating Insights

After you have gathered all your information and have understood the purpose and your audience, it’s time to start with the design process.

Design used to be the seasoning you’d sprinkle on for taste; now it’s the flour you need at the start of the recipe. — John Maeda (Designer and Technologist)

In this step, you will need to distill the information. Start with creating a wall of evidence — maps, photos, notes, and colored strings showing the links. Visualizing data in this manner will help you see the obvious and intuitive links almost immediately. All the information you have collected so far will make sense and you will be able to synthesize them in terms of real usable insights. It also helps with the future scope of improvement in the product development process when you look back at your research.

GTM in Design

A go-to-market strategy is a tactical action plan that outlines the steps necessary to succeed and create differentiation in a new market or with a new customer. It can apply to pretty much anything, from launching new products, to re-launching your company or brand or even moving a current product into a new market.

Every great design begins with an even better story. — Lorinda Mamo (Designer / Creative Director)

While creating designs, design your story first. What story is your user going to subscribe to? What is it that will resonate with them? Your design decisions will depend on these stories. The elements of your design will come from this study — colors, typography, illustration styles, font, etc. Most designers forget to include this in their research but I’d say this one of the most important steps if not the most important one.

Design Decisions

Prototypes are already used in research, of course, it has become easier and easier to collaborate with your users and test your ideas and fail fast. Learn to build multiple ideas fast and cheaply and get them validated with the target audience.

Users are not always logical, at least not on the surface. To be a great designer you need to look a little deeper into how people think and act. — Susan Dray (Expert in usability)

Introduce a fun, quirky, or helpful factor that will surprise and delight your users. This will help in creating a brand recall and increase engagement.

To Summarise

For me, I approach every project differently. Depending on the time at hand, client expectations, and scope of the project — I decide how much of a deep dive should I do into the process. But I make sure to understand the target audience and map out basic info on each of the above topics. This gives me a head start in designing meaningful solutions. Insight teams act as a supporting membrane in organizations to understand more about their customers’ lives. Hence, insights are the cornerstone of the innovation process and a catalyst for creating new value for customers.

To young designers, I’d suggest spending time on defining a process to understand your target audience, it will go a long way in building a holistic and effective design process!

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