Don't Design for Everyone, Design for Niche.
Our mental model of "who" we build for isn't working. It's time to evolve.
Doesn’t the term ‘target user’ sound like a mic drop? It’s definitive, confident and whispers look at me, I’ve found product-market fit.
The roots are important. Adapted from the marketing and sales concept of “target markets” or “target audiences” that emerged in the 1950s when competitive markets became saturated and mass marketing strategies weren’t enough, the target user has become common in startup philosophy.
My top issue: it’s being used as a blueprint for humans, often based on complete fiction, that justifies assumptions and excuses investigation. It’s the epitome of BUILD IT → [insert] DEFINE THEM → THEY WILL COME, which, as Steve Blank has said best, is “a prayer, not a strategy.”
Call me surly, but I think one of the reasons why product development is broken is because we’re stuck in a dichotomy of either building for a fictional “target user” or worse, “everyone.”
In both cases, humans are an afterthought.
Our sequence for development is antithetical. Tech has normalized leading with product vision and roadmap prioritization, without equal focus on human needs and problems. In reality, the power we should lean into is human. Problems and needs are what determine value, de-risk investments, and pave the path to product-market fit.
Before we go deeper into philosophy, let’s do some unpacking…
Target user.
The term “target” is reductive. And so is “user.” It quite literally makes humans into a static bullseye, dismissing our fundamental nature - we evolve and change. I understand the aspiration to focus and I’m a fan of narrowing our lens thoughtfully. But there’s a better, more equitable, human way to talk about designing and developing for people.
Everyone.
On the other end of the spectrum “designing for everyone” is bogus. Experience is not ubiquitous or the same for everyone, because humans carry context.
No moment is singular.
No moment is static.
No moment is definitive.
And no two moments are the same.
One of our great differentiators is that humans continuously write and rewrite “the facts” of experiences through the expression and interpretation of our senses over time. This can be a power or flaw depending on the situation.
What this means for product development in simple terms is that you can not dilute the variables of human experience and think it’s possible to design for everyone. We can not possibly cater to individual experience. Additionally, it’s a given that humans change, some argue that we are doing so at more rapid intervals.
Yet, tech hubris blinds ego into simplifying the complexity of humans into dimensions that are compartmentalized and considered “addressable.”
In business, we learn to generalize populations. Terms like TAM (Total Addressable Market), SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market), SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) are expected in pitches and touted by startups that have yet to find PMF (Product Market Fit) or even release a Beta product.
We’re addicted to imagining scale, so much that we’ve ingrained processes that are broken and distance development from the core elements of human nature: need, criticality, value, importance and impact.
The alternative.
There is a better way. Truth is, you’ve probably heard it and rejected it because it challenged your beliefs and questioned your conviction. So before reading another sentence, just step back and look at your mobile device or take out a piece of paper and try to make a list of all the products you tried and abandoned. 90% of startups fail for a reason.
It’s rarely just because they ran out of funding or had a dysfunctional leadership team, it’s usually because they followed the status quo and built a product for everyone and thereby no one, too f*ing fast. You’ve read it before “don’t fall in love with the solution” and you may have thought, oh yea fall in love with the problem.
As Don Norman said “A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.”
Problems, are a good target. Start there.
The strength of a problem revolves around a few factors:
Specificity: a context driven by root causes that are beyond control/authority/power/self-actualization
Severity: the more serious or extreme the problem, the more impact and power it has
Frequency: the more humans experience a problem, the more it is disruptive and therefore the more it matters
Importance: the more the problem interferes with what is critical (values, desires, and goals) the more addressing it is a priority. Note that importance is a component that differentiates an adopter from an engaged user.
Because systems drive context and most are broken, you’ll often find patterns across demographics, but they are never a starting place, nor are they ever sufficient for defining a population.
In an ideal world, you’ll have signal on this all well before you design and build a product. Because the opportunity once you have these layers: problem, severity, frequency and importance, is to understand the experience today which includes: context, journey, moments of friction and moments that matter. This is how you focus your target further, these insights are what drive the parameters of niche.
Is it niche enough?
Niche is space. Niche is environment. Niche is what gives you intelligence and ensures you don’t knit a blanket instead of socks. Niche feeds your team and specifically empowers designer creativity. Skipping research that helps you understand what is niche, reinforces building what is easy.
Niche is what makes your product stand out, what makes a user think this was made for me, and what creates “stickiness.”
USAA, initially focusing on insurance for military officers, recognized the unique challenges faced by service members. Their first offering was car insurance. By addressing specific needs, they built a loyal customer base. While NPS is flawed (an article for another time) USAA’s tends to be 75 which is 4X+ of any other financial institution. Over time, USAA’s offerings grew to include additional insurance products, banking, and retirement. They also expanded their coverage to service family members. This reflects the essence of not diluting the human experience but instead understanding and catering to it.
When are you ready to expand?
There’s no compass for expansion readiness, but I always start with the basics: difference and similarity.
Take Oxo, for example. They didn't just design kitchen tools for the average cook; they first considered the experience of those with arthritis. While their products solved a specific problem, they appealed to a much broader audience because of ease of use and comfort. This is the power of understanding the real, evolving needs of people.
When my team does research, we do what we call problem-market research to help tell the contextual narrative about how the humans who we are building for or who use an existing product are unique. The more you understand those nuances, the better decisions you’ll make about features, the design, the experience, the marketing collateral, and customer touch points.
When you start with the problem assessment and evaluate: root causes, severity, frequency, and importance you’re building a narrative of clues. This method of research strengthens the foundation for expansion because it always starts with first principles.
Analogous populations.
That narrative of deep insight becomes the thoroughfare to identify analogous populations.
I always go back to the problem, it’s the root of the context and the only surefire way to design with confidence, knowing that there’s a potential to generate value. But there’s always nuance in the details of the journey, moments of friction and moments that matter.
Value is personal and subjective. It’s rarely universal nor scalable when it’s not a matter of physiological needs. This is why so often, when we look at product analytics we see a spectrum of data across health and experience. Often we hyper-fixate on the usage, engagement, satisfaction and churn, but rarely do we look under the hood to assess the value our product’s generate.
While I still have the mic…
It’s time we start owning the responsibility of designing and developing products. We’re accountable for more than throwing darts.
Problems are the lighthouse. When we start product development by targeting a problem, we create room to shift strategies, to re-prioritize features, to refine MVPs (for new products) and think about the long term roadmap. Focusing on the problem creates space to understand the experience, journey and solutions today.
The problem will bring you closer to humans, it grounds you in psychographics, and helps you understand how systems have impacted people across socio-economic statuses and racial constructs. If you want to create a sticky, meaningful product, fall in love with the problem, get to know the humans, understand their niche and build for them.