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The people who buy your technology product are typically not the people who use your technology product. 1
Every tech product is built as a very tall stack of layers. Each layer is purchased (or selected) by the developer one level down. So, even if the person who uses a tech product is the one who buys it, they didn’t buy all the hundreds of layers underneath it. 2
Corporate buyers are often mandated to do one thing: spend less money. Therefore, the products they choose to purchase are usually not the best for the job, and rarely the best for the person who must use it. 3
Business people typically interact with other business people. That is, they interact with the people who buy their products and very frequently they have no contact at all with the people who actually use their products. 4
When product buyers purchase a product, they typically prefer those products with lots of value. Because they don’t actually use the product, their definition of value is usually just a count of features. 5
So, product buyers tend to buy feature rich products. But feature rich products are rarely the products that make the people who use the products the most productive. 6
In fact, products with the most features are often the products that are the least productive for the people who actually use it. 7
Designers, being the enlightened denizens of planet Whitespace, typically hate the complexity and difficulty of features, so they ruthlessly eliminate them. 8
But the people who actually use tech products don’t really use functionality as a primary determiner of success. So, once again, the criteria used by the product creator is not the criteria valued by the person who uses the product. Even though it is “designed." 9
What matters most to people who actually use tech products is the mental model they use to understand the job they are doing. 10
This, of course, implies that there are many, many mental models that are relevant to the creation, design, and presentation of any tech product. 11
Finding the common threads in those disparate mental models is a difficult, but not impossible job. 12
Presenting the behavior of the tech product in a way that is consistent with the mental models of the people who use it is far more important than what the product is actually capable of doing. 13
In order to understand all of those different mental models used by the people who use your product, you can’t assess them as a group. You can’t lump them into a single category or type. That’s why you can never refer to the people who use your tech product as “users.” 14
You need a mechanism for understanding the population of people who use your product as a series of pluralities of people with common mental models. 15
Actual real people who actually use your tech product might seem like a reasonable approach to this problem, but that path is fraught. Each real person is idiosyncratic. 16
That is, up to a point, a real person is representative, but then, past that point, not so much. In the heat of design (and particularly in the heat of pitching the design to co-workers), the dividing line becomes a counterproductive, argumentative weapon for others. 17
What you need is a “real” person who uses your tech product, but who only has the mental models that are relevant to your product without all of the concomitant baggage of being a complex, multifaceted human. 18
It’s a real hurdle for those who have to design complex digital behavior. You need to get into the heads of your users, but you cannot use any single one of them, but neither can you group them all together. 19
Maybe someday someone will find a way to untie this Gordian knot. Until then, let’s just keep the shiny side up. 20
