Idea comes first

“Creation is the birth of something, and something cannot come from nothing. When someone creates something: a painting, a poem, a photograph, the creativity comes from an idea, from a feeling, from emotion, or from a combination of ideas, feelings and emotions that are somehow “reborn” from all our experiences and perspectives.. “— Peter Lindbergh – Pirelli

A design should be created to fulfill its users’ needs. The first step of a design process is to understand requirements and users — to meet the user and understand his behavior, his working environment, his likes and dislikes and his way of thinking.

Sometimes it feels very tempting to jump into the design phase without doing research about user. This can be dangerous for the product and destroy its experience.

A good approach in user centered design process is to create user personas based on user information including his bio, skills, behaviors and expertise. Refer to this persona many times while designing the product. This will help to follow the right track.

A designer is not a user, neither he could be. He should not rely on his own assumptions and likes/dislikes while making design decisions.

“You’re almost always wrong about your users.” — Manik Rathee

UX designer role is much related to human psychology. He needs to understand human psyche in order to develop user flows and interactions.

He should be able to predict the users actions while navigating through the design. Then he can put this information into papers and screens.

All this can be done based on designer’s knowledge about human behavior in general and specifically about his users.

Source: UX DESIGN WORLD