"I don't get many things right the first time/
In fact, I am told that a lot."
-Ben Folds, The Luckiest

My IQ hovers somewhere around 135, which puts me in the "moderately smart, but no genius" category. Mensa won't be begging me to apply any time soon.

Now, I've worked with and go to school with some really smart people, people with either a very broad grasp of the world or else a very deep view of certain subjects. Occasionally both. People with IQs in the 150s-160s, for sure. And I really enjoy being around them; they make me stretch my mental muscles. But, doing what I do, designing products for people to use, it's often important to not be that smart. It's important to be a little dense.

Unless you are designing for a very small, very focused user group of brilliant people (a rare occurrence), you can't design products as though everyone has above-average intelligence. Which is one of the reasons that digital products designed by programmers fail: most programmers very smart, logical people. But most people (me included) are not as smart and not as logical as programmers. The abstractions they deal with all the time simply aren't appropriate for a general audience.

I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that the smarter you are, the more comfortable you are with abstraction and metaphor, be they numbers or words or images. The command-line interface is much more abstract than the desktop GUI, "the computer for the rest of us" as the old Mac ads said. Without the GUI, I probably wouldn't be writing this and you probably wouldn't be reading this either. By making the UI slightly less abstract (albeit far from perfect), the computer became usable by millions instead of thousands.

Now, don't get me wrong: it does help a designer to be smart. The GUI was a brilliant innovation, done by smart people. Designers need to understand their product (and its implications) better than most of the people who use it. (This gets really hard when you're designing for a user group with deep subject-matter knowledge, like when I worked for Datek/Ameritrade and its user group of active online traders.) Designers also need to convey their designs to the people who'll code and build them, which requires a lot of grey matter. But we should always keep in mind the average user, who is not us.

Personas help. A persona can help give a designer empathy (as opposed to sympathy) for the average user. Even at Ameritrade, we had an unofficial persona of "Toni's Grandmother," named, appropriately enough, after our project manager's grandmother. Toni's Grandmother isn't computer-savvy and doesn't grasp complex things easily. Now, Toni's grandmother didn't even make the top three personas we designed for, but I did think about her and her needs and goals while designing. It helps that, at heart, I'm not all that far from Toni's Grandmother. I find computers to be too confusing and too complex. They are still too hard to maintain and comprehend and often get in the way of the tasks I want to do. It takes me a while to figure out how to use my cell phone--and I still get it wrong half the time, hanging up on people who call me instead of answering the phone. I'm a little dense. And it makes me, I think, a better designer.

Posted at 09:30 AM | comments (2) | trackback (0)