At the start of a project you should always start by asking who is the user and how might they make use of products or services.

This extends to:

• Being very clear on who our end user is
• Understanding the context in which the end user will use products and services
• In the research itself, allowing users to be themselves, to feedback on product and services in context and, in doing so, allow us to build a good understanding of user behaviour
• Taking our understanding of user behaviour and allowing it to inform the ongoing iterative development of our products and services

As part of this we also need to be aware of our own biases based on our own experience. We need to be aware that we always make assumptions about others and the world around us (see Module 2.1 for more details on this).

Unless you make an active effort to be aware of your own biases then the danger is that you design for yourself rather than the target user and ultimately don’t deliver to their needs.

The exercise of focusing on the end user is especially important when:

• The target user is of a different age
• The target user is not well
• The target user has different cognitive abilities
• The target user has several diseases (comorbidities) or a condition that changes day to day (episodic health issues)
• The target user has specific attitudes or capabilities regarding technology
• The target user is socially, financially or technologically marginalised
• The target user relies on formal or informal care

Principles for understanding users

The best way to represent the end user in context is to involve the end user in the design and development process. While this presents a number of logistical and ethics challenges, the effort is well rewarded, with insight and understanding ensuring products and services are more inclusive, meaningful and mindful.

The principles of our approach here can be summarised as:

• Make every effort to understand people in the context of their real lives
• Create an atmosphere and rapport that allows people to be themselves
• Go beyond what people say and structure research that allows you to see what people do
• Encourage the creativity of the end user to help you understand and enable them to play a role in problem solving
• Be open, transparent, considerate and ethical in all dealings with research participants

In later sections we’ll be looking at how research can be carried out taking these principles into account.

Ctrl Group have used a number of tools such personas, user stories and user tools to bring the context and reality of end users to life as part of the design process. While we’ll not go into the detail of these at this stage, we would encourage each team to have a clearly articulated view of the target user, outline where the needs of this group coincide with the needs of the project team and encourage a line of question which checks if what you’re building will work for the end user in context.