By Christine Perfetti, Consultant, User Interface Engineering from an email from Jared Spool
We hear all the time from designers that they’re faced with the huge challenge of designing products and web sites for a large number of different users. Many designers tackle this problem by making the functionality of the web site or product as extensive as possible. To do this, they outline all of the goals of each user, identify any commonalities between these goals, and add all of the functionality needed to satisfy these common goals.
This one-size-fits-all approach worked for designers back in
the days when the functionality of software and web sites was
simple, with users confined to a very limited set of goals.
But today’s web sites and software are vastly more complex and
present designers with the unwieldy problem of trying to include
functionality for thousands of users all with very different
goals. In theory, by increasing the product functionality to
account for many users’ goals, designers are satisfying a larger
audience base. We’ve observed, however, that by trying to satisfy the
needs of *all* users, designers often fail to satisfy the needs of
*any* one user.