An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups

Assessing Technical Requirements

Assessing technical requirements is a surprisingly tricky prospect for small teams. While there’s no need to guess the size of a person’s monitor, the type of computer system, or the speed of the Internet connection today, planning for future upgrades can be next to impossible. Small businesses and state agencies, in particular, often have patchwork computer systems; sometimes running operating systems and other software that disappeared long ago in the corporate world. And frequently, emergencies like computer or other hardware breakdowns or failures drive upgrades rather than the ongoing need for better technology. Designing your Web application, intranet application, or server-side software to run on computer configurations in such an atmosphere can be frustrating.

Immersion in the Workgroup Culture

When creating a digital experience for a very small audience, the design and development team can find it beneficial to immerse themselves in the day-to-day routines of the workgroup—not just for an initial round of contextual inquiry, but also for on-site usability testing of rapid prototypes and ongoing beta testing.

This type of perpetual, one-on-one interaction with users requires especially strong interviewing, observation, and interpersonal skills. And the relationship between the development team and the users becomes extremely close. If you have a three-to-six-month project engagement, you might very well feel you’ve become part of the group. The difference between creating a specialized digital experience for a small audience versus a more generalized experience for a larger one is similar to that between designing and building a home, working with the family that will live in it, versus constructing an apartment building where you know only general demographics about the people who will dwell in it.

Just Enough User Interface

While an off-the-shelf product might provide a quickly implemented, stable solution, users who are not technology professionals might not find it easy to work with it. For instance, 37signals Basecamp, shown in Figure 1, provides an excellent way of managing virtual teams of designers and developers. However, it’s not as good for managing people with non-technical backgrounds who—despite how easy it all seems to us—can find the product’s user interface and conventions unfamiliar and overwhelming.

It’s considered almost politically incorrect these days to mention that some people, whether by virtue of their age or working background, might not be comfortable using computers and exploiting the online world to its fullest extent. But even though there are some seniors who can code rings around the rest of us and plumbers and electricians who use PDAs and Web-based scheduling and invoicing systems, the fact remains that learning a new computer program still intimidates a good portion of the population outside the technology industry.

For small workgroups like those I’m discussing, the problem is: Organizations whose members are not intimidated by technology generally already have digital solutions for their workflow issues. So, we have to solve these problems for the remainder who have been reluctant to embrace technology.

Off-the-shelf solutions—even those built for industry-specific workflows—often have user interfaces that, even if elegant, are too complex for entry-level users and have features that are wholly unnecessary to the tasks such small workgroups need to accomplish. Paring such user interfaces down to the bare minimum of features users need is one of our most important tasks as UX designers for small audiences.

Avoiding Design Process Pitfalls

While UX design for small audiences is, in many ways, simpler than large-scale product development, it can still be a process-management challenge. In fact, controlling the process and making it work within the close quarters of a small business or government entity can be the most difficult part of this type of work.

Because there are no barriers between the users and a UX consultant, you must be absolutely clear about defining each step of the design process and its appropriate tasks. The temptation for small teams is to revisit issues—long after you’ve considered them closed. Small organization dynamics are different from those of larger organizations—they’re often less formal, with flattened hierarchies. For example, in a company of ten people, everyone might want and expect to have input into the design. And, to add another wrinkle, if you’re the designer or developer on the project, the user could very well be your employer, which can make it difficult to say no when people ask for inappropriate changes. Outlining the steps you’re embarking upon, getting buy-in at each stage, and ultimately, sticking to your plan is paramount.

It’s also vital that an outside design team understand the project and its relative importance within the company’s workflow. The danger of designing custom and semi-custom applications for a single person or a very small workgroup is that, one day, the user or users might move on to other jobs. Designers must design the final product not just for a specialized task, nor for a particular person in a role, but for a combination of the two—a difficult balance to achieve.

Once development of the new system is complete, ensuring users have adequate training on the system is an important step that development teams sometimes overlook. Providing users with Help, good documentation, and product support and making the occasional phone call to see how things are going can make a big difference in an organization’s overall satisfaction with an application.

For the UX professionals who are willing to take on the challenges of designing applications for small audiences, the process of interviewing, researching, and understanding the requirements of the user base becomes a much more intimate exercise. Such an experience not only brings valuable insights to your projects for larger organizations and audiences, but can also help you to hone your design process in a demanding environment. Ultimately, UX design for small audiences might end up being a unique area of expertise, with its own best practices and techniques.