Shine a Light on Your Actual User (Part 1)

Are we focusing on the right user? We need to realize that the user is not ourselves.

I'm writing some thoughts on THE USER and how we need to think about the actual user of the system that we are designing, and how we need to go beyond the persona and really get into the user's state, motivations, and needs at each moment in time.

I think this basic concept is familiar -- indeed, probably unequivocal to most designers. Yet I see designers ignore this in actual practice fairly often. So I thought it might be worth writing about.

This is Part 1 of my story ... and, to be up front, this first part won't have anything to do with design! Sorry. This is the Cautionary Tale ... but I hope it's amusing, and I hope it will be a useful example to keep in mind, particularly as I move to Part 2.

Background of the Cautionary Tale

For several years I traveled to the same place almost every single week. It was part of the job and I accepted it. And pretty soon, I had my routine. I had my favorite flight times, my favorite hotel, favorite restaurants, and even favorite past times while traveling.

One night, as I got into my hotel room around 10pm with my bag of In-N-Out (I typically flew up on Monday after putting in a day's work at the office), I noticed something off. Something was wrong with the room. It felt awkward and weird.

They had changed the lightbulbs! Instead of the previous "soft white" lightbulbs, they installed "daylight" lightbulbs throughout the whole room. It was awful!

Way Too Much Info About Lightbulbs

For those very few of you who are not lightbulb connoisseurs, I'll provide a very brief discussion here.

There are multiple types of lightbulbs and multiple measures. Most people are familiar with wattage or lumens that measure brightness.

There is also a measure of "temperature" that describes the color or feel of the light.

"Daylight" is a bit like it sounds. It is light that is similar to natural light from the sun. It is very white in appearance.

"Soft White" is much more yellow in appearance. Technically, these differences are measured in Kelvin, and daylight is typically 5000-6500K and soft white is typically 2700-3000K.

From the description, I think most people would think, "Oh, well, isn't daylight or natural light the best?" The answer is -- it depends. It depends on what you want in your lighting and what you want to do.

If you want to study, read, do work, or just sit around with your friends and play games, daylight might, indeed, be the best choice. There are studies that show that exposure to "daylight" light tends to make many people more alert. This is great if you need to concentrate and do work -- here's one such study that shows people perform better at tasks with daylight or "cool" light vs warm light.

But if you are at the end of the day, and you're tired, and you just want to get ready for bed, daylight might not be so good.

So what's great for a desk might not be what you want for a nightstand. And if you want to go to sleep, daylight might be the opposite of what you want. You don't want to be alert when you want to get a good night's sleep.

It "POPS!"

I complained to the hotel manager about this and even sent him an article about the difference between daylight and soft white lighting. And I asked him why they made the change.

He explained to me that the hotel finally made the shift to LED lights to save on electricity, and they set up four different hotel rooms with four different temperatures of lighting. Ultimately the Marketing department made the decision and they determined that the Daylight lightbulbs really made the room "pop," particularly for their marketing brochure photos.

I showed the manager articles like the one above and talked to him about the differences between lights.

I asked him to look at a picture like this and asked him what kind of lighting he might want in his hotel room at 10 or 11pm after a hard day of work and travel.

Finally, I asked him what kind of lights he has in his own house in his own bedroom.

He looked at me and shrugged, saying that it wasn't his decision. The Marketing department liked the way the rooms looked with the daylight bulb.

Because I'm a pretty loyal customer with lots and lots of status points, he offered to provide my feedback to the Marketing department, but could not promise anything ...

Anyway ... I didn't get anywhere ... for that night I went to the store and bought my own soft white bulbs and swapped them out (and then swapped back when I checked out) ... and I made a mental note to find a new hotel. (The whole story of swapping lightbulbs and having the hotel hold the lightbulbs for me in between trips is another story for another time.)

Maybe the daylight bulbs make the room "pop" for marketing brochures, but I predict it won't have the same effect for returning guests.

Stay tuned for: Part 2

Obviously, this is not an example of being empathetic and user-centered. It's the opposite. It's being ego-centered -- it's assuming that whatever I like (here, the marketing department wanting nice photos that "pop") is what everyone else is going to like.

As I said, I don't think there are any designers who actually say this ... but when I see behaviors, decisions, and practices ... some designers do act this way ... and more often than any of us would like to admit.

We designers need to critically assess the difference between what WE LIKE vs what OUR ACTUAL USERS WANT.

Here's Part 2.