Frustrated Designing For Your Users? Try Pretending They’re Babies
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Frustrated Designing For Your Users? Try Pretending They’re Babies
A fun way to re-frame your thoughts when you’re ready to scrap everything
Do you ever get frustrated by users
- getting tripped up on your most basic of flows?
- completely ignoring your elegantly designed features?
- abusing your system and then getting mad at you for letting them do it?
- leaving you long winded angry reviews that don’t seem to say anything?
- just not being the user you expected to use your experience?
Totally understandable.
But here’s the thing, you’re often designing for users of all demographics. From the grandparents who don’t know how to navigate the internet on their own, to the Gen Z populace who expect everything to be accomplished in one click. You can’t please everyone, and that can be incredibly annoying.
But wait!
Don’t get discouraged!
Give in to the urge to start from scratch, but this time, pretend your users are babies.
I started doing this as a thought experiment when I was getting overwhelmed with the amount of redesigning I had to do.
You might be thinking, UX for real users is infinitely more nuanced than designing for babies.
And in most cases, the obvious answer is yes, of course.
But to help get back to figuring out what your MVP should be, what foundational experiences you need to have to succeed, and to keep you in a positive head space when thinking about your users, think babies.
Just keep scrolling through cute baby photos until your mind starts regressing all your users’ to the age where they were cute and unassuming. Put those images on the faces of the users behind scathing survey results and reviews.
Usually after a solid ten minutes of babies in onesies on Instagram I already feel marginally better, and then I’m ready to start re-framing.
Babies have no knowledge of your product
If you’re trying to be novel and innovative, your users probably know nothing about your product.
You can assume that you’ll need to hold their hand, and teach them how you want them to use it.
Babies will attack your product with increasingly random interactions
Much like the technologically challenged division of the older generation.
If something is frozen, or isn’t producing what they want, you can bet they’ll be mashing every button you’ve got on your page in the hopes that something will show up.
You need to figure out what interactions should be allowed, and when.
Babies will get angry at your product (and you), but won’t be able to articulate it exactly
Tantrums will be a given. They’ll likely manifest to you as negative reviews with no meaningful detail, or empty bug reports that just tell you that something went wrong, but not what.
Be patient. They don’t know enough about your product to use language that you’re thinking in when they’re trying to tell you what’s wrong.
Look for patterns in the data, look at what they’re saying, and what they’re not saying.
They’re at least trying to communicate. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have bothered writing a review in the first place.
Babies just want the thing to be done, they don’t care about the details
Babies want food, naps, clean diapers. They don’t notice if the food is gourmet, or the diapers are organic.
Your users just want their basic needs to be met. All your fancy extra features and animations mean nothing to them if they can’t accomplish what they came to you for.
As tempting as it can be to design what you think would be cool, you have to remember to focus on what your users are telling you they need.
If anything, all your sparkly pop-ups are just going to aggravate them more as they try to look at an old order they’ll never be able to find because you decided order history wasn’t that aesthetically interesting.
Babies are cute, unassuming, and mean you no harm
Your users are too, it’s just hard to remember that sometimes.
When you’re faced with 1 star reviews, angry emojis, and frustrated emails, it can be hard to stay positive.
By framing your users as babies, you can abstract all that negativity behind the sweet façade of an exuberant baby pushing all the buttons it can find on your website. You can get back to the basics and start re-prioritizing.
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