JACK: I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
ALGERNON: We have.
JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course.
JACK: What fools.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Empathy - the thing at the heart of every good design, and the heart of every clever designer. The best designs understand the user. Through that, they can cut off problems at the pass...before they become too big an issue.This was perhaps best explained to me in a honors design class entitled Design Thinking for Our Community. We had a guest speaker (a psychologist turned designer) give us a simple picture of a light switch, like this:
and asked us a seemingly stupid question: Is the light on or off?
Sensing a trick questions, one clever student responded that it depends if it is on a three-way circuit or not. "No, you're thinking too about it. That's not what I'm asking. Is it on or off?" he responded. Unable to avoid the obvious answer, we respond the switch is toggled up, so it is on.
But of course - that answer was indeed not exactly correct. The correct answer? It depends on where you are.
Here comes the takeaway.
In some countries, up means on. In others, up means off. The point is you have to understand your user ---> and you have to understand them at the earliest point in the design process. You don't want to spend thousands of dollars inventing a new switch for China and find out it was designed up-side-down. That'd be both embarrassing and expensive.
So, the moral of the story is be empathetic. Understand your user. Observe them, what their instincts are, how they react, and so on. That is one of the things that'll make the difference between a well-designed product and the awkward (expensive) product sitting in the corner.
