Becoming a Relentless Advocate for Your Humans

Becoming a relentless advocate for your humans is about as unnerving as it sounds. And who are your humans anyway? There is much debate over the proper word for humans who use your digital products like “users” and “customers” and “clients” and “members”. User experience design has become common lingo with it’s history dating back quit a while.

I much prefer the human side of things. Users are great and you most certainly want to design for them, but I advocate for the human as it feels more inclusive a group that is so often forgotten as to be nameless. Those individuals who are NOT YET your users. This group brings to mind terms such as “customer acquisition” and “lead generation” and “lead conversion.” The often forgotten group of NOT YET users are those individuals who are just getting started with your product or service OR may not have started yet but are thinking about it. First timers! Yes we have customer acquisition, but that doesn’t account for the design of the UX with newcomers in mind. Only the marketing and activities that led to acquiring them. What about catering to them?

We attempt to obtain new customers, but we forget what being new feels like. We forget what mental constructs have not yet been built. We know too much about our product. We have thoroughly dissected the inner-workings of feature combination and…