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You are not the only place

Published on 2024-10-03 design

When working on a project, it's easy to become absorbed. We sometimes fail to realize that our users are not as single-minded: They can and will use other systems. If we want to build anything of value, we must look beyond our own systems and understand the broader context in which our users operate.

Here are three cases in which I should have realized that sooner:

Design like your users spend most of their time elsewhere

In the world of design, we often emphasize the importance of consistency. However, unless you are Google or Facebook, and probably even then, you should expect that your users spend far more time on other people's websites then on yours. We should therefore think beyond our own design guidelines and consider how our users experience the web as a whole.

Be open for external references

During my time at an organization that provided online forums for political discussion, we made a critical oversight: we assumed that conversations were confined to our platform. We failed to acknowledge that discussions were happening everywhere — on social media, in news articles, and in everyday conversations. Instead of merely hosting discussions, we should have focused on summarizing the broader discourse and providing useful references to other platforms. By doing so, we could have positioned ourselves as a valuable resource in the larger conversation. Instead, we quickly vanished into irrelevance as discussions where happening elsewhere.

Know your niche

At a conference focused on systems for scientific libraries, I witnessed a fascinating discussion: Many attendees were surprised to learn that researchers often begin their searches on platforms like Google, and only turn to the library for "known item search" when they want to get access to a publication that is not open access.

Some of the attendees were open to accepting that fact and concluded that we should focus on making the known item search really good. Others were offended and felt like we need to do a better job of communicating the benefits of a proper topical search. Yet others noted that in very competitive fields, researchers do not use external search providers because they are afraid that others could find out what they are working on.

Any of these strategies is better than ignoring the issue.

Conclusion: Context Matters

In all three examples, the underlying issue was a tendency to be self-obsessed, overlooking the fact that users engage with a multitude of systems. If we recognize that we are not the only place, we can ultimately build better systems that actually provide value for our users.