12 Jun 2008 0706H

But what happens if you DO happen to be the user?

The famous UX tenet is, “we are not the users.” Let’s not take that so literally. The spirit of that statement, for all the fundamentalists out there, is to avoid making judgments about whole groups of people’s behaviors solely on personal proclivities alone.

Now, if you happen to fall into the neighborhood of people that form a persona, that still doesn’t give you the right to say, “I like blue, and I shop this way, so everyone else shops this way, so everything should be blue, and we’ll design it so that it accommodates my individual prefs, since I am, after all, this persona.”

Um no. We can use our experiences as a springboard sure, but, a far more rigorous practice is to assume nothing and remove one’s self from the pool of data so that we can truly have a representative idea of what user behaviors are like in the aggregate.

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