I was recently rejigging our Proust Questionnaire of Copy Prompts for a new client that falls much more in the community organizing space than the business space, and it got me thinking about this principle. There are differences in how we approach strategizing for difference kinds of organizations and different kinds of brands, but no matter what it always comes back to your people. So let’s get into Principle 3 of Human-Centred Design!

People, not Users

This thing we’re talking about used to be called user-centered design, and has shifted to human-centered, which is semantics, certainly, but it’s a semantic difference that feels important as we talk about how we here at Flegg Creative are trying to approach our work. We’re trying to help you (our people!) achieve your goals, and those goals most often boil down to you helping YOUR people to achieve their goals. At the end of the day we’re all just people doing our best to do meaningful things with our time. So we’re not designing for users, we’re designing for people.

Where to start

It’s really tempting, especially when creating a new brand from scratch, to design for what you YOU love. This endeavour is your baby after all, it makes sense you’d want it to reflect your design sensibilities. And your audience might be people like you, maybe that’s a big part of your brand (renowned portrait photographer Jonathan Canlas recommends approaching your audience as if they’re “you but with money”), but it’s certainly not a given. So we start by asking the question “who are are we trying to reach?” and go from there.

Form follows function

You’ve heard this one from us before and it’s a solid place to return to in this situation as well. The first question we ask is “who is your audience?” but the second question isn’t “what is my audience’s favourite colour?” The second question is “what do you want those people to do?” or “how do you want those people feel?” With a conventional business, the answer to the first question is, ultimately, obvious (buy things) but the question of how you want them to feel to get them to a place of wanting to buy is trickier.

And what can be great about a community organization is that the question of what you want someone to do can often be easier to answer than how do you want them to feel. While the absence of a clear sales channel might seem at first like a stumbling block since it precludes that easy answer to the first questions (buy stuff), it can actually mean that you have simpler and more specific answers.

Take Koksilah Watershed Group for example. This is a hyper-local community group focused on protecting the watershed of the Koksilah River, a small but important and vulnerable tributary of the Cowichan River. They don’t sell anything, but they came to us with a crystal clear answer to the question of who their audience is — people who live in the Koksilah and Cowichan watershed who are concerned about the damage being done by logging in the headwaters — and what they wanted those people to do — sign on to the open letter to forestry company Mosaic demanding a halt to their plans to log the headwaters until the Xwulqw’selu (Koksilah) Watershed Sustainability Plan is still in development.

There’s power in purpose

They know their audience. It’s made up of their neighbours, their co-workers, their compatriots on the Cowichan Watershed Board and all the stakeholders that have been creating the Xwulqw’selu (Koksilah) Watershed Sustainability Plan, elected officials in the municipalities that overlap in and around the watershed. They’re not all the same people, and they’re not all just like the members of KWG, but they all share a key thing: deep connection to the place where they live and a strong desire to protect it. And there it is.

Now that we know who we’re speaking to and what we want them to do, the design emerges. We built a blog page where KWG can share updates, starting with the open letter, and we added a form to the letter where readers could add their names and emails to get added to the letter. We chose a colour palette that reflects the rich colours of the landscape. We pulled together that huge amount of data and resources the group had collected through academic reports and citizen science and created an organized path through it, making it more accessible to more people and giving their audience multiple ways to benefit from it. We used photos of the river and its estuary to spark familiarity and inspire action.

And back to our commitment to design for you the client’s own ease and enjoyment, we linked the open letter form to a spreadsheet using a free plugin so there’s no data entry and no extra step for tracking progress. All the names just magically appear on the spreadsheet that lives in their existing drive. We did an in-person tutorial for multiple KWG members on how to update blog posts, add events and reports so everyone felt confident getting the most out of their new site.

It’s all about connection

I know that at it’s worst this kind of sentiment is just more people trying to get you to buy things, and it feels in authentic and disingenuous. But at it’s best I think it honours that mostly we’re just people out here trying to create things that feel meaningful not only for ourselves but also for other people. And at the centre of all this strategy and design work is the search for those other people. And I think that’s worthwhile.