MYP Design Clients and Target Audiences Notes

Somebody Has to Be Waiting for This

1. Criterion A asks for a need belonging to a specified client or target audience, and specified means named on the page, not implied.
2. A design with no named user ends up judged on whether it looks nice, which is the weakest test there is.
3. Naming a user turns arguments about taste into questions with answers: does it fit her hand, can he reach it from a wheelchair, will it survive a Year 7 corridor.
4. Choose the user before you choose the product, because the user sets almost every constraint that follows.
5. In an MYP project the best clients are people you can walk to: a teacher, the librarian, a grandparent, the groundskeeper.

The Client Signs It Off, the Audience Uses It

1. The client is the one person or organisation who asks for the work and decides whether what you hand over is acceptable.
2. The target audience is the wider group who will actually use it, described by shared traits rather than by name.
3. A librarian commissioning a book display stand is the client, while the Year 8s browsing it are the audience.
4. The librarian cares about shelf space, restocking time and cost, and the Year 8s care only about whether covers face them at eye height.
5. When the two conflict the client usually wins on constraints and the audience wins on usability, and you write the trade off down rather than hiding it.

A User Profile Is a Design Tool, Not a Biography

1. A user profile is half a page describing your user only in the ways that change the design.
2. Include age range, reach and grip strength, the setting they use it in, how long a session lasts, and what their other hand is busy doing.
3. Leave out favourite colour and star sign unless colour is genuinely part of the brief.
4. Write each line so it could become a specification point later, since "carries a bag in the other hand" becomes "must be liftable one handed by an eleven year old".
5. Note what they already own, because a product that duplicates something already in their pocket rarely gets used twice.
6. Write two or three profiles if the audience genuinely splits, for example left handed users or wheelchair users.

Measure Your Users, Do Not Picture Them

1. Anthropometric data is the measured size of human bodies, and it is the quickest way to stop guessing dimensions.
2. Published tables list reach, grip, seat height and finger size by age and percentile, and most design textbooks carry a set.
3. Designers normally work to the 5th to 95th percentile range, which covers the middle 90 per cent of a population and drops only the extremes.
4. Where no table covers your group, measure ten real users with a tape measure and record the spread rather than the average.
5. Ergonomics is what you then do with those numbers, shaping the product so a body can use it comfortably and safely.
6. A handle sized from adult data slips in a Year 7 hand, because the gap between an adult grip and an eleven year old grip runs to tens of millimetres.

Designing for Someone Whose Day You Cannot Picture

1. The hardest users to design for are the ones whose routine you have never watched.
2. Spend time in their setting before you sketch, because the constraint you miss is almost always environmental: a sloping floor, a locked cupboard, no power socket.
3. Try the task under their conditions, so fill the watering can wearing gardening gloves or open the jar using one hand.
4. Ask them to show you rather than tell you, since people describe their routines far more tidily than they perform them.
5. Look for workarounds, because the tape holding a cupboard door shut is a design brief somebody already wrote.
6. Avoid excluding users by accident, since a lid needing a firm twist rules out anyone with arthritis, and that should be a decision you took rather than one you drifted into.

Constraints From the Client Are a Gift

1. Ask the client early for the boundaries: budget, deadline, where it will live, who maintains it, and what it must never do.
2. Each answer deletes a whole family of possible designs, which makes the next three weeks faster.
3. "It has to fit through a 760 mm doorway" and "it must survive the same cleaning spray as the desks" are worth more than an hour of brainstorming.
4. Record constraints in the client's own words and read them back for confirmation, because remembered constraints drift within a fortnight.
5. How to run that conversation so it produces usable data is the subject of the next article on primary research.

Your Client Comes Back at Every Stage

1. The client is not a page you write once and file away.
2. They sign off the design brief, so the brief has to be written in language they actually use.
3. Their answers turn into the design specification, which is the yardstick your ideas are judged against under Developing ideas.
4. They test your prototype during Creating the solution and give the feedback that Evaluating is built on.
5. Keep a dated log of every contact, because three dated meetings in a folder make a client real to a moderator who has never met them.