Users: obviously the heart of what we're doing as interaction designers. So how do we catch this user focus? We need to know who they are. Who are our users? Are they at home in the office? Are they people with university degrees? Are they people who are older, people who are younger? There's lots of different kinds of users. Who are they?
Do you know who they are? Do you know the details of the way in which they they live their lives or they do that work? What do they do? And that's not an easy question. Sometimes it's obvious, they're changing their heating controller. They're creating a video. But what do they really do? What are the details of it? And where are they? What's the context they're working in? This is about requirements, the needs for use. Understanding the users, understanding where they're at.
That's at the heart. If you can't understand that, you'll not being able to actually design for them. One crucial thing about who they are is they're probably not like you. And it is very hard to get your head into somebody else's head. In fact, you probably shouldn't try to get your head into somebody else's head. You try to understand what's in their head, not what you put there. So how are you going to do it? They're probably not like you. So you need to talk to them. And that's true of all sorts of users. You might talk to people as individuals.
You might talk as groups, just trying to understand what makes them tick. What are the ways in which they think? What are their desires? What are their goals? Watch them, because actually sometimes we're not good at actually saying what we do. Sometimes when we see somebody or when somebody watches what we do, they notice things about it we would never have known ourselves. It's particularly true of expert behaviors. Things that we're so good at we don't even know we're doing them. And that could be true of verbal things,
that can be true of physical things. Often in sports. It's when you filmed somebody, the trainer can say, "Oh, you need to stretch your leg a little bit tighter when you get to this point on the track" or "slow down here". When you're in the midst of doing the activity, it's not possible. It's only when it gets watched that things go on. Sometimes you have to use your imagination. And this is a problem, because we can just
imagine ourselves and not fully understand it. You should use your imagination informed by what you observe when you talk to people. But sometimes you might have to deal with situations where you can't actually be there. You probably can't hitch a lift up to the International Space Station in order to do some design up there. You can talk to people who've been there. You can perhaps get video footage of what's happening there. But you probably will not be able to go there yourself. So sometimes you have to use an element of imagination.
Some of your users might be people who are difficult to access. They might be doing very... perhaps CEOs of companies, if you're designing for those you probably are not going to get 10 CEOs together for a focus group. At most, you might get people who work closely with them. You might get one or two to talk to, but probably you're going to have to do a lot from secondary sources. So sometimes you have to use your imagination. What you can do is use your direct knowledge in order to inform that.
And there's techniques particularly that can help you do that business. Personas, which are about capturing descriptions, rich descriptions of individuals. Cultural probes, which are about putting things into people's context so that they can tell you or you get some information on what they're doing. Technology probes, you create a piece of technology, a piece of a system that you can deploy and learn from. And then embodying that into scenarios, rich stories of what's going on.
And particularly trying to understand the context, the broader context that people are in. So lots of things that you should be starting to think about in order to build those rich understandings of people's situations in ways that can then inform your imagination. Which in the end, you're going to probably have to use in order to create novel designs. And perhaps also in order to communicate the knowledge you've got to other people
within your organization, within your design context.