To design great products, you need to experience them firsthand early on

The most important thing when you’re new to a project is to see it for yourself

Art by midjourney

“What do I think a Minion is? It’s that ugly yellow thing with the glasses, right? " a user said to me during testing, what I feared might happen.

Our expert product team, with 50+ years combined experience in the field, had coined this term as technical jargon for our product. They were confident users would understand the concept. I wasn’t.

No, I wasn’t designing these things

However, it was then that I made a crucial mistake you must avoid: I kept quiet since I was new to the field and wondered if it was just me. As Designers, one of the most important things is always to ask questions, even if it seems stupid.

You need firsthand experience as a designer to understand particular features and where novices might struggle because your team is likely full of experts.

People don’t recognize their expertise unless it benefits them

Despite my team individually having 10+ years in the field, they didn’t consider themselves experts. Most people don’t. Unless they’re applying for new jobs, or it benefits them, they don’t consider themselves experts.

As a result, they still felt they had a firm grasp of what it was like to be a new user and how much people knew about the subject.

Experts may be surprised with what the average person knows (XKCD)

Unfortuantely, as the comic suggests, that isn’t true. This is why firsthand knowledge of a project is necessary.

While you are not your user, approaching a project with brand-new eyes can help you spot usability issues and ask questions to help you create better designs.

Conversely, if you rely on secondhand knowledge, screenshots, and information others share, your team’s blindspots are now your own.

Even if you ask many questions about the Client’s needs and wants, what they forget to mention (or even think about) are things you might not uncover until deep into user testing.

Heuristic evaluation and competitive research are the best techniques for experiencing things firsthand and gathering knowledge.

(Informal) Heuristic evaluation for evaluating first-hand experience

Heuristic Evaluation is a fancy way to stretch a limited UX research budget. While it can’t replace user research, it’s a way of identifying glaring UI issues and identifying design rationale for these problems.

Essentially, you go through a typical workflow and evaluate an interface while considering Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. When you encounter a problem, you essentially categorize it into one of ten categories:

• Visibility of System Status

• Match Between the System and the Real World

• User Control and Freedom

• Consistency and Standards

• Error Prevention

• Recognition Rather than Recall

• Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

• Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

• Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors

• Help and Documentation

For example, you might single out a poor Progress bar indicator and label it a “Visibility of System Status” issue that needs to be fixed. When you do so, you also might want to jot down a few questions that come to mind around it, such as:

• Do we need to show when the system hangs (i.e., “Did not load?”)

• What do we want users to do if no progress is being made? Wait 15 minutes?

• How long is this process supposed to take?

• Etc.

Having worked in startup environments for a while, I advocate for informal heuristic evaluation to limit time, effort, and scope. What I mean by this is not creating a formal report that you present to stakeholders. Instead, you create a list of questions (and issues) about things you’ve uncovered, which you can use to start discussing with the team.

However, that’s not the only approach that you have available.

(Informal) Competitive research shows how others tackle problems

Sometimes, you don’t have an existing product you can reference; you may have a list of requirements for designing something new.

In these cases, one of the first steps may be identifying the product's ‘core requirements’ and seeing how your competitors approach it. These requirements are either marked as high priority (e.g., “Must Have,” “For MVP release,” etc.) or are central to how the users will use the site.

For example, if you’re designing an e-commerce website, a core requirement is the ‘search results page,’ where users can browse a filtered list of products from a search result.

Rather than doing complete competitive research where you analyze a user’s entire workflow, you may look at how different competitors tackled that one specific requirement to understand the crucial elements of this context.

While you won’t know the exact details of requirements competitors were told to design, hopefully, this will raise some questions about what you must design. For example, with the “Search Results” page, we might ask the following questions:

• How important is it to have additional filters on the page?

• How much detail is given on a specific product?

• What display name is shown for these products (i.e., is it a technical name like “Part FAJH236?)

• What does each “Search result” consist of (Name, Reviews, Price, etc?)”

• etc.

Whether through heuristic evaluation or competitive research, gaining this first-hand knowledge allows you to do one critical thing early on: figure out a novice’s perspective.

You don’t stay a novice forever: make use of that limited time

After you start designing a product for a little while, you cease to become a novice anymore. Instead, you become what people often call a “perpetual intermediate” user, as you have some knowledge of what the project is.

So, it can be essential to try to figure things out yourself rather than just following what the experts on your team say.

Firsthand knowledge of where you struggled when learning concepts or trying to make sense of specific terminology can be valuable and help you design a better user experience.

So, before you get wrapped up in getting expert opinions and seeing demos done by other people, see it for yourself. You might help surface questions and issues that might be things that also trip up your users.

Two new cohorts of my Data-Informed Design course just opened up! I’m taking 12 Designers on a journey to become more effective through the power of Data.

If you want to learn more, book a 1:1 call with me today!