Designing for an Audience

Sometimes as a designer you start to feel pressure to create something that will make sense to an imagined audience. The audience could be peers or stakeholders at your company, or end-users of the product you’re designing. You want your work to be clear and easy to understand for these people. That’s an important goal to have, but sometimes the pressure to create something that makes sense sneaks in too early. Like, as early as when when you’re staring at a blank page. Before you make a mark, you can become so concerned with whether your ideas make sense that you overwhelm yourself and get stuck.

This is because clarifying your thinking and distilling it for audience consumption are different things. If you aren’t already thinking clearly about something, it will be difficult to get to that clarity if you’re trying to explain the ideas to an audience at the same time. The extra responsibility will overload you and slow your progress, or prevent it altogether.

When you’re thinking about something new, it’s okay to be selfish about it if it improves your understanding of the problem. Don’t worry about creating something that any outsider can understand. The outsider doesn’t need to understand your work so early on, you do. I recommend that in the earliest stages of the design process you focus on designing at a level at which you can actually produce something.

For anyone with perfectionist tendencies, or with an inherent desire for things to make sense, this can be uncomfortable. Think about how it might work for a writer. Instead of worrying about writing for an audience, they would focus on writing to further their own understanding. The result might be a more informal, questioning writing style—one that doesn’t come off as polished or even logical to an outsider. For a designer this same approach could mean a canvas with imperfect elements and half-ideas strewn all over the place. If you shared the canvas someone else, it might be impossible for them to provide feedback.

To design at the level at which you can actually produce something, you also need to become more comfortable with creating things that are not good. Place an element on the canvas and leave it there. Don’t fiddle with it. Complete iteration one no matter how wrong it is, because doing so will further your understanding of the problem and allow you to move forward.

When you’re in the ambiguity of the early design process and you start feeling the pressure to make your work make sense for an imagined audience, be selfish. Worry less about making sense to others, and focus on producing something concrete that helps you think clearly about the problem.