Everyone has some story of being stuck on a terrible automated phone-menu. Some tragic tale of a time you needed to contact your phone or cable company for a quick technical fix and instead spent three hours of your life trapped in a Kafka-esque nightmare of redundant menus, bounced transfers, and dropped calls. Or you've had the distinct displeasure of brushing up against Canadian bureaucracy, trying to download a simple PDF from a government site that is hidden like a state secret behind a maze of dead-links, bad redirects, and overlapping login accounts.

We've all been there. It's the kind of routine misery that becomes fodder for two-drink minimum open mic sets, the mundane drudgery of modern life we've  come to expect. But I have to ask, why? Why do we still have to wrestle with these busted systems when we all know their terrible? Why are designers failing to fix these obvious issues?

At the heart of the problem, it's that these systems are not being designed for humans. 

Instead, they're designed for "use-cases.” For little categories that can be fit into a very specific flow. They're designed for an idealized image of the user - that the problem you have will be easily quantifiable and fit in a "press 1 for...” format. That you'll be able to remember a password for an account you set up seven years ago and haven't touched since. They're designed for phantoms, for an imaginary construct of a person.

Don't repeat the same mistakes. Don't build your website to work like an automat where users punch in one button and get one result. Design your website for humans. 

What are people coming to your site to do? What are they looking to accomplish? Depending on what kind of site you have, there could be all kinds of answers to that question. They could be there to shop. They could be there for a recommendation or consultation. They could be there to read a blog, or check their account, or play a silly browser game. Hopefully you've done your research before starting out and have a good idea of what your particular customers want.

What you need to do from there is map out those reasons. You need to make sure you're not creating the website equivalent of "press 1 to...” It needs to be easy for users to get what they want.

Look at the most common entry points for your site. This means more than just your home page, it also means blogs users might have been linked to, products, promotions, and targeted landing pages. When a user lands on one of those pages, is it obvious and clear what the next step is? If they have a specific goal (I clicked on this link to a blog about a particular product, now I want to go and buy this product) is the path to do achieve that goal obvious and clear?

The most frustrating thing for a user to encounter is a dead-end. When something that should be easy to find or access becomes difficult. The bigger your site and the more services you offer, the greater the chances are of this happening. Map things out in the design stage to iron out these wrinkles before a user ever bumps into them.

One of the easiest ways to "human-test” your design is to simply read things out loud. Whenever you're drafting a form, writing some copy, or providing instructions, read it all out like you were addressing a stranger. 

Reading your content out loud will help you identify rough patches, robo-speak, and unclear directions.. Anything that doesn't sound like something you would say to a person sitting across from you should be reexamined and edited. When designing for humans, you want to aim for clarity and flow. That means keeping things brief, clear, and not overly formal. Treat people like people.

Break out your binoculars and find a nice patch to sit in the tall grass, it's time to nature watch. When designing for humans, there is no better test than watching how your site performs in the wild. Thankfully, it's never been easier to monitor the results.

See how people are actually using your site by monitor your analytics and looking for patterns.  Scan for pain points, sections where people seem to get hung up or abandon the site. Watch how people find your site, where they come from, what page they land on first and where they do from there. Use that info to optimize the experience.

Of course, anayltics only go far. If you really want to know people, you have to talk to them. Watch for patterns in the feedback you receive. If you regularly receive emails asking for information that is available on the site, than you know you haven't done a good enough job of making those resources clear and accessible. Or, if you're getting questions about something that isn't on the site, congratulations! You've just identified a content gap to fill!

When you're in the weeds designing a site, it's so easy to get lost. You spend so much time thinking about all the content you need to add, the features you want, and all the extra details, that you can forget that the ultimate purpose of every website is to serve the people who visit it. That's a mistake you don't want to make. 

Don't bring another bad user experience into the world. Remember that your site is going to be used by living, breathing, human beings - that's who you need to design for.