<p>Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2sTCN8w">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Jessica Lovegood </p>
<h3>Designers give shit design advice</h3>
<p>When designing websites, apps or emails the one thing you need along the way is feedback. It’s important that during your creative process you don’t get stuck into designing what you like, but focus on your customer’s needs.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2sTJgQP">Credit to Just something (<a href="http://ift.tt/222mUpx">http://ift.tt/222mUpx</a>)</p>
<p>But often we ask our peers, a designer who sits in the desk next to us or perhaps even a design critique website. But these people aren’t our customers and it’s important to branch out to the right types of people.</p>
<h3>My advice? At the very least ask a non-designer.</h3>
<p>Using user experience testing to influence your design decisions is a key part of this and must be done. However, I try to get myself on the correct path in the first stages by asking people around me and specifically the kinds of people that would use your product.</p>
<p>For example, if it’s a student facing product I’ll often chat to by brother as he works in a student’s union in the marketing department. He has collected vast knowledge around what is liked and disliked in the exact people I’m aiming for.</p>
<p>I don’t ask a specific question at this stage, I keep it open. This gives the most honest answer and spots things that a customer would notice at first glance. For this stage, thats great, just to get a good heading.</p>
<p>Finding people who aren’t experts in design gives you the more ‘real’ feedback on what a user would feel from using your product or service even if you don’t have the opportunity to do real user research yet. A customer would never say ‘I don’t like that they have 2px more to the left’ like a designer would, but they might say ‘I just don’t feel that the website is showing what they do clearly enough’.</p>
<p>That is real usable feedback that can help the conversion of a customer’s website before it even goes live… And that’s the whole point isn’t it?</p>
<h3>Don’t forget your user research</h3>
<p>Finally, just because this is useful to get you started, doesn’t mean it can replace user feedback. It is vital to a website/app/game’s success that you put real users in front of it and watch them use it; not just at the start of a project, but regularly throughout a product/services lifecycle.</p>
<p><a href="http://ift.tt/2nLylTp">More on user research here</a>!</p>
<p><img src="http://ift.tt/2spgqE9" width="1" height="1" alt="stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSou"></p>
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<p><a href="http://ift.tt/2sTvNsi">Designers give shit design advice.</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


Designers give shit design advice.

Designers give shit design advice

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