Remembering to ask what the user need is

Me and Andrew (interaction designer I work with) worked on ideas for our contact centre staff to quickly send reports to people.

We sketched out a flow on post-it notes and he helped me to mock up the screens in code.

I’m a beginner at creating prototypes in code so this was a great opportunity for me to improve my skills.

The flow includes a screen where users select the type of reports they want to send.

On the next screen we tell users they should have permission to create a report. By clicking continue the user creates a report.

Andrew suggested adding a way for users to go back if they made a mistake.

If users could go back to this screen they could check or change which report types they’d selected.

He helped me to add a back to previous page link to the screen.

After adding the back link I told him I’d add the same link to all of the other screens we’d built.

But he stopped me and asked a very important question.

What is the user need?

Now I’d learnt how to add the back link I’d got ahead of myself.

I assumed that all the screens needed a back link too because we’d added the link to the one screen.

This was a big lesson for me as a graduate designer.

Always remember to ask yourself what the user need is. Don’t add complexity.