Know your Users..but How?

No matter how much you try to improve the interaction of a product to increase the user experience, it’s hard unless you have exposure to the real users and their goals.

I feel in India very few fortunate Interaction designers have the opportunities to meet the real users. Some fortunate ID’s may have an opportunity to meet representative users in India if the particular industry/service/domain/practice exists in India. I would say some of the very common e-commerce (and few more emerging areas) application designers can find their users easily? But most of the high tech product’s user base is largely located in West and we always have imaginary user profile in our mind.

If you share the similar experience or at least agree to this point read on…

My experience or way of knowing users so far is not been very pleasant journey however:

• I depend on product managers and some other people at work to know more about users.
• Some amount of Googling also helps to find more information about users if you are really lucky.
• Knowing or studying more about the specific domain in question also helps, but I definitely do not agree that one can have clear picture of users by just knowing the domain and how it functions.
• Gather information from friends/colleagues who might know some one in the in that particular industry so that get contact of them and learn more (by having conversations)

How do you people gather information about users and their goals?

Next I am planning to write about Interface Designing-Interaction Designing..