Design Wants vs. User Needs

Heute einmal ein Guest-post von northernarmy.com, der es einfach mal auf den Punkt bringt. Den Perma-link findet ihr hier: http://northernarmy.com/2011/03/design-wants-user-needs/

Design Wants vs. User Needs
I try to make as much time for events as I can, to meet interesting people, to listen to people with different points of view and to generally squeeze as much juice out of my mind grapes as I can. One of the events I always enjoy, and I’m not just saying this because I happen to organize it, too, is Social Media Breakfast Ottawa.

Since we started the event, we’ve intentionally strayed away from social media because while there’s a lot to be said about social media, there is only so many times you can hear it. As a result, we’ve tried to draw from a different group of speakers with varying backgrounds to shape how we think about digital marketing in general.

Today’s speaker – David Nicholson – spoke about game theory, and the “gameification” of business. It was a great talk with a lot of interesting tidbits, but as is usually the case, the most interesting moment of the talk for me came over dinner the night before.

While discussing the new landscape of game development, David mentioned that online game developers are spending huge dollars on data analysts to guide the development of their games. For giants like Farmville or Frontierville, the entire job is to take a loss leader (the game) and generate money through virtual goods, which means that creating the best game dynamic in the world, the best new level, the best twist on gameplay doesn’t matter in the least unless it drives the desired action. If your users don’t use it, it’s a waste of time, plain and simple… even if you think they should use it the way you lovingly crafted it for them.

Think about how we create websites – how we create experiences – for our users, our customers, our members. More often than not, we create based on how we want people to use our site, rather than how they actually use it.

The reason is because humans are hard-wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It feels good to make the logo bigger, to add more calls-to-action and make sure that there are lots of links to our website in all of our emails, but how much does that actually move the bottom line?

Conversely, poring over data, challenging our assumptions and listening to our customers is hard work and can tell us we’re doing the wrong thing, that we don’t understand what our users want, and make us feel bad and bad at our job.

The trick is that the games industry relies on these changes to directly impact the bottom line. They don’t get paid unless their experience generates the right behaviour to make dollar signs happen. Marketing is closely related to the bottom line, but the path from A to B is far more circuitous, so we’re much freer to indulge our marketing id, and ignore the marketing superego who’s just begging you to spend a little more time looking at your analytics.

Before you can create great design, you need to know where you want it to lead, and how you’ll know when you get there. You can choose to be finished anytime you like – the question is whether you wait until you’re happy or until your users are happy.