The Human Case for UX
Hi! I’m Rosie, a web and brand designer here at Creatomatic.
I recently completed the Google UX Professional Certificate, covering everything from user research and wireframing through to prototyping, usability testing, and accessibility. There was a lot to take in!
The further I got into it, the more I kept arriving at the same conclusion: to really work, a website needs to understand the people it exists for. You could follow every step of the process to a T and still end up with something that misses the mark, because the important work hasn’t been done at the beginning to understand who you are designing for.
Listen before you build
One of the foundational ideas within the Google UX course is that no design decision should be made before user research has taken place. The industry has a toolkit of research methods which exist because the history of design is littered with products built on assumptions rather than evidence.
Think about Gap’s logo redesign – they spent a significant amount on a new logo, unveiled it without any customer research or testing, and received such an immediate backlash that they reverted to the original logo after six days. Or, the launch of Google Glass, who assumed people wanted always-on computing without thinking about the bystanders who would feel under surveillance by it.
Learning how to use Figma, or Adobe XD, is straightforward enough to learn. Problem solving is much harder. At Creatomatic, we lean on the collective judgement of a team that has spent years learning what works and what doesn’t. It’s a heuristic approach, earned through experience and applied to each new project. We pride ourselves on being curious about our clients, interested in who they are and what they do, and wanting to find out how we can help them. Every new project starts with a deep dive into what matters: what’s working and what isn’t, who we’re trying to attract, and future goals.
But there’s a more uncomfortable layer to this than simply ‘do more research’. Graphic designer and writer Ruben Pater, in his book The Politics of Design, argues that design cannot be disconnected from the values and assumptions embedded in its creation. The problem isn’t just that designers make wrong assumptions about what users want, it’s that they make invisible assumptions about who counts as a user at all. Research done without interrogating who’s been left out of the room can embed exactly the biases they were meant to correct.
What the course made clear is that most of these failures aren’t the result of arrogance, they’re the result of the biases we hold as humans without even realising it. Unconscious bias means we carry assumptions we genuinely don’t know we have. Similarity bias draws us toward designing for people who resemble us. Recency bias means whoever we spoke to last has influence on what we think next. Confirmation bias is the human tendency to favor information that confirms preexisting beliefs. You’re looking to understand, but you have to be honest about whose understanding you’re actually centering. Good process exists to counteract these tendencies. It doesn’t eliminate bias, but it creates checkpoints.
A drop off is a person who gave up
Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, first published in 1988 and still one of the most read books in design, makes an argument that feels as relevant to websites today as it did to physical products in the 1980s: design is the communication between an object and the person using it. When that communication breaks down, people don’t blame the design, they blame themselves. They feel confused, incapable, or simply not the right kind of person for this product, so they leave.
Norman’s most famous example is a door. Most of us have pushed when we should have pulled, felt a brief flicker of embarrassment, and moved on. The door was badly designed. We assumed it was us. His point that confusion is a design failure, not a user failure is exactly what the UX discipline was built to address.
Every friction point in a digital experience is someone’s personal experience. Frustration, confusion, and distrust are as much design outputs as delight, clarity, and confidence. The question is which ones you’re actively designing for, and which ones you’re accidentally creating through inattention.
Getting it right before moving on
A significant portion of the course is dedicated to prototyping and testing cycles, through building low-fidelity wireframes, getting them in front of users early, watching what breaks and what works, and reiterating before handing over to build.
The practical argument for this is well-established: it’s cheaper to fix a problem in a wireframe than in a live product. But the more interesting argument is the human one.
When Airbnb was close to failing in 2009, the founders didn’t run a sprint. They flew to New York, stayed with hosts, and did in-person interviews. They found listings had terrible photos. One insight, from direct human contact, doubled revenue within a week. The product hadn’t changed, but their understanding of the person using it had.
At Creatomatic, our design phase works the same way. Initial layouts start a conversation. Feedback shapes everything. We don’t move forward until clients are excited about what they’re seeing.
Accessibility isn’t optional
The practical side of accessibility runs throughout the Google UX course because it’s non-negotiable. A product that only works for some of the people who need it hasn’t solved the problem, it’s solved it for some and called it done.
Inaccessible designs are the result of designing for the person you picture most easily, which tends to be someone who looks, moves, and perceives the world like the person doing the designing. Colour contrasts that are fine for most people and invisible to some. Forms that assume a level of literacy not all users share. Navigation that works on a desktop and falls apart on a phone being used one-handed on a train.
At Creatomatic, accessibility is scoped from day one. Colour contrast checks and font size tests are carried out during the design stage. Before anything goes live, our 40-point testing checklist covers everything from browser compatibility, performance, and mobile responsiveness.
The course gives you rigorous, evidence-based tools to answer the question: who is this actually for, and how will they feel using it? But the tools only work if the intent is already there. You can run a user interview without listening. You can conduct usability testing without acting on what you learn. You can hit every accessibility benchmark and still build something that treats people as an afterthought.
‘Human-made digital’ means something more specific than good design. It means the people using what we build are (metaphorically) in the room at every stage of the process.
