As a creative field, Design found its Analogy with architecture; it was required to be functional, usable, and predictable, while also being beautiful, emotional, and novel. Designers considered business priorities, user needs, and material constraints amongst other factors, and designed the solutions. These factors (or requirements) remained constant while the designers channeled their creativity to come up with innovative and perfectionist solutions for the target market.
The present: Create for the personas
In the digital world, Design borrowed tenets from the previous era but with one fundamental difference: the solution became a living entity. The digital “Product” of today constantly learns about the user’s understanding of itself and evolves as it learns. The requirement comes in batches and continuously builds on top of the existing solution. Markers in the product give a quantitative assessment of the user’s behavior; We track metrics such as number of sessions, frequency of sessions, time of the day when sessions happen, activation through notification vs organic, session duration, most used buttons (or features), click order per screen, time spent per screen, scrolls per screen, number of list items consumed per screen, etc. A measure of each metric highlights high-level patterns and preferences of the users. I personally prefer percentile (80th) over averages to eliminate outliers. Eg: A “clickstream” visualization here shows patterns for user clicks in a session, we also used a similar visualization for “timestream” which showed time spent patterns in a session. Now, in a data-informed environment, these numbers drive product and design decisions and experiments. These numbers impact product, product impacts user behavior, user behavior impacts the numbers, and hence product evolution is an ongoing exercise always. Since we identify high-level patterns through these metrics, we are essentially designing for Personas. For example, if many of the users come online after 10 pm regularly, we will notice that behavior will probably include a night-mode feature. These users will likely be teenagers (hypothetically), so we are designing for the teenage persona in this case. Also, even before starting to design a product, our ethnographic studies focus on bucketing users in personas. Hence, both our qualitative and quantitative indicators of the day help us in designing for these Personas.
The Future: Create for the individuals
You must have had some magical experiences with a product. Some feature, some text, or some graphic which really made you feel like the product really got you. I remember Google Home picked out the top 10 restaurants in my area for my anniversary. And Cleartrip highlighted a local holiday for me while making a flight booking for the said date. Personalization in content is ubiquitous these days. Netflix, TikTok, Instagram (discover), Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the spooky internet ads are examples of content based on personalized interests. But now, we’re on the verge of elevating it to the product itself. For example, with respect to visual design, here’s an AI churning out a whopping 400 million visual design permutations. Design’s objective has always been about designing for users a.k.a User-Centric-Design. Techniques such as ethnographic studies, customer journey maps, validation exercises, surveys, product metrics, etc are all measures to understand the user better. However, the qualitative ones do not scale and the quantitative ones enable patterns at average (or percentile) level and not individuals. How AI changes things: How designers can adapt: Can AI replace designers? I believe, as long as humans are the users, we will need the human dimension on the creation side as well. As mentioned at the start, design is an evolving field, and it is quite stubborn at coming up with creative ways to keep itself relevant. Maybe we can expect a new title soon: AIXD! This article was originally published on UX Collection by Sumit Dager, a design leader, and entrepreneur. Dager helps to grow startups transition into a stable product and an innovation culture. He’s interested in creating consumer products for emerging markets and accessible innovations for disabled users.
