Context matters because nothing happens in isolation
Good design ruthlessly pursues context, to connect users’ goals, behaviours and environments with the products they use.
4 min read
Jul 2021
It isn’t earth-shattering, it is barely controversial and it’s certainly not new to assert that everything in the world is interconnected. This observation impacts not just creative and technical disciplines such as design and technology but also philosophies and religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.
Buddhists will tell you that we are connected not just to other people but to the air through our breath and to the universe through light. Designers believe that all design sits within an ecosystem and that by pursuing and understanding context, we can make it better.
Established frameworks are effective precisely because they help designers understand this interconnectedness.
World philosophies worked out a long time ago that everything relies on everything else. Good design has always understood the same thing.
Consider features vs goals and personas.
Both of these frameworks focus on pursuing context, recognising that the functions and features of the software are closely connected with the goals, behaviours and context of the users who interact with those functions. Perhaps more importantly, they believe that the harder designers work to understand context, the better they can do their job.
Features vs goals thinking starts with a simple observation that software has features but users have goals. The website provides functions to enable the user to renew their passport, but the user’s goal is to go on holiday. The website provides features to allow the user to buy a new shirt for the weekend, but the user’s goal is to look good on a date.
I have never felt entirely comfortable with Theo Levitt‘s famous features vs goals observation: “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”
Who wants a quarter-inch hole?
Much better to argue surely that they don’t want a quarter-inch hole, they want to hang a picture.
Or that they don’t want to hang a picture, they want a beautiful and personal home.
Whatever people’s ultimate motivation for owning or using a quarter-inch drill bit, I concur with Levitt about the importance of understanding context. Pursuing it empowers designers to ask good questions about users' motivations, their priorities and what persuades or inhibits them from acting. These questions can help designers understand functions and features which are more frequently used, most familiar and most valuable.
Another mainstay of design thinking, personas, also seeks to understand and summarise the human context which informs and guides design. User personas are archetypal users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. While there is no single correct way to create personas, most seek to describe goals (what the user is trying to achieve), behaviour (what they currently do or what the design needs to support) and context (the physical, technical or cognitive environment within which the design needs to work).
This exploration of context informs important design decisions such as tone of voice, content prioritisation, flow, persuasion design and information architecture. It empowers the design to communicate with the user rather than communicating at them or communicating to them.
The harder we look beyond the screen, the better we understand what belongs on it.
The importance of context is second nature in other design disciplines. My father is a retired architect and when he is asked his opinion on a house, his first instinct is to walk to a window and work out where the sun rises and sets. He understands that a house's relationship with light fundamentally affects what it is like to live there. My sister graduated in fashion design and spent her final year not just designing clothes, but making them. In fashion, a garment's design quality can only truly be assessed when it is hanging on a human body, interacting with light and sitting alongside other fabrics and garments.
World philosophies worked out a long time ago that everything relies on everything else. Good design has always understood the same thing.
Frameworks such as features vs goals, personas and jobs to be done simply give digital designers practical ways to act on that truth. They connect features to goals, products to people and interfaces to the environments in which they're actually used.
The harder we look beyond the screen, the better we understand what belongs on it.
