5 Things To Know About Your Users

Jared Spool wrote an excellent article on user context, 5 Things To Know About Users:

The user’s intentions, context, knowledge, skills, and experience are the essential things that every designer needs to know. Without this, the team is going to design something that seems useful, but they’ll never know if it actually helps the user. The result is exactly what we see with Citibank’s design — a lot of content, but not the right content.

If you’re interested in hearing more from Jared, he’ll be the keynote speaker at User Interface West, March 24 - 27, 2003.