91. Designing for the Real World: No User Left Behind

Are we inadvertently alienating users by focusing too much on ideal scenarios in our designs?

Emily Anderson, a product designer with a background in physical product design, joins us to discuss a critical gap in the design industry. With experience across emotionally charged industries like finance, healthcare, and gambling, Emily has observed that designers often focus solely on the “happy path” – the ideal user journey – while neglecting edge cases and real-world scenarios.

Emily shares insights on how this narrow focus can negatively impact both users and the business. She uses the example of offboarding experiences, which are often overlooked but can significantly affect user retention and brand loyalty. We explore strategies for conducting more effective research, advocating for edge cases without being perceived as pessimistic, and reframing user needs as business opportunities.

The conversation also touches on the challenges of the modern UX designer’s role, the importance of service design, and how to navigate the complexities of organizational structures that can hinder holistic user experiences.

Don’t miss this thought-provoking discussion that will challenge you to reconsider your approach to UX design and user research!

Topics:
• 05:47 – Emily’s backstory
• 08:57 – How did the industry get here?
• 12:32 – Is education leaving this out?
• 18:20 – Are we doing research correctly?
• 20:27 – Tips to get participants and understand the context
• 24:57 – Making an assumption can kill the experience
• 28:11 – How do we bring these things up without seeming pessimistic
• 31:13 – How do we reframe user needs as business opportunities?
• 33:08 – How do we avoid the MVP trap?
• 37:33 – the role of service design

Helpful Links:
• Connect with Emily on LinkedIn

Emily Anderson
Product Designer and Founder @ Ampersand

About Emily

Emily is the founder of a design studio, Ampersand. Having experience working amongst highly regulated and emotionally charged industries, Emily strongly believes in raising awareness of the positive and negative impacts that products and services can have on users, and how this directly links back to the business too. Coming from a physical product design background, her approach is to design beyond individual screens to understand the overall ecosystem she’s designing in. She regularly creates content to help change the narrative on how we think about users and to help designers bring unhappy paths, context, inclusion, behaviors, and emotions into their day-to-day thinking.

Connect with Emily on LinkedIn

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