Who's Your Audience?

If it’s not of value to our ideal customer, then it shouldn’t be of value to us. It’s obvious and something we’ve figured out long ago, yet we tend to forget when it comes to design.

We stop asking questions and start making decisions based on our personal values rather than the values of our customers. Justifying our decisions by arguing we know our business better than anyone else. Why? Because value is hard to measure, making it easier to base decisions on our own likes and dislikes instead of a seemingly intangible metric.

But that's a mistake. When we measure design with our own likes and dislikes, we're no longer building for our audience but for ourselves. Instead, we should ask, who’s it for? Who’s it for, frames the problem we’re trying to solve. It gives us perspective and an easy metric to measure against. Decisions are no longer based on our feelings but the goals of our audience.

When we know the goals of our audience, we're able to create value in ways we previously couldn't. And when that happens, we discover two things:

1. The group is larger than we expected
2. They tell the others