“Cultivate an allergy to average."
– Kevin Kelly in his book Excellent Advice for Living

A question we often come across in our design class¹ is:

When starting to design a new product, service, or experience, who do you design for first?

You might have an idea about a product, service, or experience you can create. Or maybe an existing one you can make better.

Faced with the difficult leap from the initial spark that’s in our head to an idea or concept we can bring into action, we often try to build something that we think everyone wants or needs. We start designing for average.

But the problem is there’s no such thing as an average person.² And when you start with average, you end up with average solutions and outcomes.

Where do the real opportunities lie? In the extremes.

The birth of the modern typewriter

It turns out that one of the first working typewriters wasn’t invented for the average writer.

It was designed for a blind person.

Not the first typewriter, but a fun Lego one with moving parts that you can build. It’s 2,000 Lego pieces of pure joy.

Pellegrino Turri, an Italian inventor, created the typewriter for his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. Legend has it that the letters she wrote him shared her progress in learning to use the device.

Although they were lovers, the Countess would start the letters with “Mio Caro Amico” (My Dear Friend)

When looking at the people you want to design for, think of them as being distributed across a bell curve. There’s the 80% in the middle (the average and mainstream) and the 20% on the edges. The ones on the edges are your extreme users.

Focus on the edges first.

What happens when you start with the edges?

Like Pellegrino Turri, you find opportunities and insights you would have missed otherwise. These people have special, amplified needs that can reveal many paths for you to pursue.

Extreme users could be:

• The parent carrying a screaming baby while shopping for groceries.
• The productivity enthusiast who spends hours optimizing their notetaking system and “second brain”.
• The distracted student addicted to social media who can’t put their phone down during class.

If you were creating a new way to enjoy coffee, the most interesting insights won’t come from the average coffee drinker. They come from the enthusiast who has 5 different ways to make coffee at home. Or the person who has been reluctant to drink coffee because they don’t know where to start.

So next time you’re on the quest to design something new, think about who is at the fringes of what you’re trying to create. The power users and the people who are least engaged. What are their needs? Start there for inspiration.