How to know your users and build just what they need

Kio Stark chronicles a participatory SRCCON conference session on human-driven design, which broke down the design process behind Census Reporter (a tool for journalists to use U.S. Census data) and outlined principles that helped keep focus over 15 months. Most work came early, according to Ryan Pitts, “You don’t build features, you’re actually solving problems. You don’t want to end up building features in search of a problem.” Three simple questions can help keep teams on task: who are our users, what do they need, and what could we build.

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